Comparing Database, Analytics, and AI Offerings

Microsoft’s database, analytics, and AI landscape includes on-premises products and Microsoft cloud-based services that are part of its Azure family of services. The products listed here correspond to the chapters and sections of the Roadmap.

The main data categories discussed include products and services for:

• Transactional data (also called relational and structured data)
• Semi-structured (also called NoSQL and nonrelational data with a dynamic schema, such as document and graph data)
• Unstructured data (including Big Data and data lakes and lakehouses).

The processes discussed in each category include the following:

Store and manage involves writing and reading data, indexing and querying, data security, and high availability, disaster recovery, and scaling features.

Ingest and integrate includes the processes of receiving data and combining data from multiple sources into a logical format, known as extract, transform, and load (ETL), delivering the data to another service for processing and storage.