Azure Data Lake Generally Available for Big Data

Azure Data Lake is a Microsoft-hosted service that provides storage and computing components to help capture and analyze Big Data. The Data Lake Store and Data Lake Analytics components can work together or independently are simpler to deploy than an on-premises Hadoop environment, and do not require substantial hardware investment. The service has a SQL-based interface that will benefit organizations with SQL skills that want to incorporate Big Data analysis results in other SQL-based applications. The two components incur costs separately, which enables organizations to maintain persistent storage and scale computing resources only when needed.

Data Lakes Store Big Data for Analysis

A “data lake” is a data storage repository whose purpose is to hold vast amounts of unprocessed data (often called Big Data) in its native format until it is needed. Big Data, such as social media posts and sensor data, are typically unstructured data notable by a significant variety in content and unpredictable changes in structure over time, which makes it complex to analyze the data with traditional database solutions.