New Big Data Features Coming to Data Warehouse Appliances

A new version of SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) based on SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 is planned for the first half of 2013 and is expected to deliver much higher performance at a significantly reduced cost. PDW is a data warehouse appliance for special-purpose databases that stores large volumes of data for reporting, data mining, and decision making. The appliance is intended for data warehouses of hundreds of terabytes, spread over large numbers of commodity servers. Eventually, important new technologies planned for PDW will find their way into SQL Server for other purposes.

Cost-Efficient Scaling

PDW provides a low-cost, easy-to-deploy, and preconfigured appliance system built with commodity components. Rather than a single system with a large number of processors (“scale-up”), PDW delivers “scale-out” architecture by using multiple lower-cost servers (nodes) running Windows Server 2012 installed into data center racks. The size is configurable when the system is ordered. Although it can consist of a physically large system (up to four data center racks), PDW appears to the user as a single SQL Server.