Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Microsoft offers an end to end portfolio for data warehouse requirements. This covers the traditional, operational and logical or modern tiers. It is basically a service dedicated to massively parallel processing Data Warehouse workloads.

It is an elastic DW-as-a-service with enterprise-class features. You can easily move data, to Azure SQL Data Warehouse from on premises, or from other cloud platforms.Microsoft offers an array of tools and services both on-premises and in the cloud to achieve this. Microsoft's partner network also has a plethora of data management offerings.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse scales to petabytes with the massively parallel processing architecture capabilities. And with these capabilities, you can control your cost independent of computing and storage. It offices a scaling engine which offers 100 DWU to 6,000 DWU. A DWU is a data warehousing unit. And data warehousing units govern the amount of computing and memory that the compute engine will have access to during the processing of the workload. The storage aspect of the data warehouse is completely separate to the computer aspect. Meaning the customers who have more requirements for computing over storage can leverage a scalable compute engine. Customers who have a requirement for more data storage than computing can leverage a fixed price customer storage and can scale down or even off or paused on the compute engine and thus not incurring any compute costs.

It also enables querying across relational and non-relational data with the integration of PolyBase. It is perfect for the integration point in the hybrid environments where customers are looking to adapt to Cloud adoption or Cloud services, but predominantly maintain governance in control from an on-premises aspect.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse positioning and benefits:

It is a relation of data warehouse's service which is fully managed by Microsoft. It is the industry's first elastic cloud data warehouse with enterprise-grade capabilities. It can be integrated with on-premises and other cloud assets. Other benefits are:

1. It is Cloud based.

2. It supports dev/test and exploratory workloads as well as critical production in workloads.

3. It has a distinct advantage because of its local to cloud-born data. Meaning that data born from the cloud can quickly be consumed and stored in the data warehouse.

4. Supports hub and spoke architecture approaches for the platform as a service and infrastructure as a service offering. This enables easy integration and architectural adoption of Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

5. This being SQL Server platform technology is better than non-relational platforms for interactive reporting and drew down requirements.

6. It integrates with Azure Data factory, machine learning, and other Azure services.