Azure Stream Analytics Improves Enterprise Features

• Azure Stream Analytics, a cloud service and on-premises software, provides real-time data stream analysis and event handling from sources such as Web site clickstreams and IoT sensors.
• It offers quick deployment and scaling, and familiarity for SQL Server developers and analysts.
• The offering is less flexible than other Microsoft analytics offerings, and it only works with select Azure data services.
• Recent updates increase data query sizes, improve testing, and preview authentication capabilities and a new dedicated deployment option.

Azure Stream Analytics is a high-speed data stream event processing solution available as a cloud service and as on-premises software to collect data locally in Internet of Things (IoT) edge scenarios. It provides built-in data connectors that would be expensive and difficult to duplicate with on-premises solutions. However, the service limits data inputs and outputs to select Azure services and data formats.

Business Need and Benefits

Streaming event data, sometimes logged on the order of megabytes per second and higher, are commonly archived for later analysis but often have critical value when analyzed as they arrive. For example, ad targeting, equipment predictive maintenance, fraud and identity theft detection, stock market predictions, and automobile telemetry-based services require real-time interpretation of events to be most effective.