Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a cloud-based data warehouse-as-a-service hosted within Microsoft’s Azure platform. It has a massively parallel processing (MPP) shared nothing architecture capable of distributing query computation over a set of compute nodes running Azure SQL Database and uses Azure Storage Blobs as the underlying data storage.
Contents
By combining MPP architecture and Azure storage capabilities, SQL Data Warehouse can:
It is designed to handle computational and data intensive queries on datasets exceeding 1TB. This technology is based on Microsoft’s on premise data warehousing product, Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), which runs on the Analytics Platform System (APS).
Azure SQL Data Warehouse decouples compute and storage enabling compute power to be adjusted independently of storage based on workload requirements any given time.
Allocation of resources to SQL Data Warehouse is measured in Data Warehouse Units (DWUs). DWUs are a measure of underlying resources like CPU, memory, IOPS, which are allocated to your SQL Data Warehouse. Increasing the number of DWUs increases resources and performance. Specifically, DWUs help ensure that:
This PaaS also features PolyBase which allows queries to span across both structured and unstructured analytical workloads using Transact-SQL(TSQL). PolyBase is also the optimal method to load data into SQL Data Warehouse as it does so in parallel across the compute nodes.
All data is written geo-redundantly across regions for high availability and disaster recovery. Scaling computation does not require reorganization of the underlying data which allows this operation to take only the time needed to allocate new compute nodes. This data warehousing service also includes the ability to pause a data warehouse instance which also pauses the billing of the compute nodes.
Data Tools
SQL Data Warehouse integrates with data tools such as Azure Machine Learning for advanced analytics, Azure Data Factory for data orchestration, Azure Stream Analytics for real-time analytics, and Power BI for data visualization. Standard query tools like SQL Management Studio (SSMS), SQLCMD, and SQL Server Data Tools can also be used to execute queries.
Use Cases
History
SQL Data Warehouse is generally available as of July 12, 2016. It was in limited public preview on June 25, 2015.
Pricing
Azure SQL Data Warehouse, is an elastic cloud data warehousing service that allows pausing and scaling on demand. It creates a SQL-based view across all your data which enables business insights. Pricing in January 2017 is approximately 1/10th of the cost of traditional appliance solutions.