PolyBase Unstructured Data Storage Options

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SQL Server 2016 includes PolyBase, a database management engine that simplifies access to unstructured data in Hadoop, Microsoft’s Hadoop-based HDInsight service, and Azure Blob Storage.

Hadoop

Hadoop is a popular Apache open-source software framework that distributes processing and storage of large unstructured data sets across clusters of commodity computers. The framework provides fast processing with parallel computing, high reliability with automatic failover, and lower cost than high-performance servers and storage.

Hadoop is often used to compile statistics from massive Web server logs for ad targeting and to extract consumer trends. Such data are typically unstructured with significant variety and unpredictable changes in content and structure over time, which makes analyzing the data with traditional database solutions complex.

A common barrier to implementing Hadoop is that it requires special skills to build and manage a Hadoop cluster and to create data processing jobs in Hadoop. Supported Hadoop providers include Hortonworks and Cloudera, Microsoft partners.

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