Today we will explore some of the reasons why enterprise should choose Azure SQL Data Warehouse. If you want to understand the nitty gritty of the Azure Data Warehouse, please go through the ‘Introduction to Azure SQL Data Warehouse’
Platform as a Service (PaaS) Offering
Data Warehouse is offered as a platform as a service in Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure. The service is fully managed, which means you don’t have to pay for hardware or don’t need to spend time on software updates or bother about security.
The users need to pay only for what they need and when they need it.
Built on the SQL Server
The SQL Data Warehouse extends the T-SQL constructs to create indexes, partitions and stored procedures, which allows us to easily migrate to the cloud. Azure SQL Data Warehouse has complete support and compatibility with SQL tools and offerings.
Elasticity
Azure SQL Data Warehouse is highly ELASTIC in nature. Azure SQL Data Warehouse independently scales computing and storage so customers only pay for the query performance.
You only need to pay for what you used. Scale it up for large queries and scale it back when your production demand is less. If you ‘Pause the service’, you only pay for the storage.
SQL Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) with Bring Your Own Key support
Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) with Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse is under preview. Now you can have control of the keys used for encryption at rest with TDE by storing these master keys in Azure Key Vault.
Polybase
Nowadays, essentially the need to combine structured and unstructured data is quite common. With PolyBase, SQL Data Warehouse offers the ability to combine data sets easily.
In addition, SQL Data Warehouse can query unstructured and semi-structured data stored in Azure Storage or Cloudera using familiar T-SQL skills making it easy to combine data sets no matter where it is stored.
Azure Data Warehouse supports Massively Parallel Processing
Another reason for Azure is its support for Massively Parallel Processing (MPP ) nature.
MPP means one to many relationship
Say if 80% of the servers went down then the request could also be fulfilled. MPP doesn’t depend on the single machine/limited hardware resources.
![MPP]()
Hybrid infra supports
With SQL Data Warehouse you are able to quickly move to the cloud without having to move all of your infrastructure along with it. With the Analytics Platform System, Microsoft Azure and Azure SQL Data Warehouse, you can have the data warehouse solution you need on-premises, in the cloud or a hybrid solution. Microsoft has built-in support for a number of their other tools and data services.
Built-in Backups
Azure SQL Data Warehouse automatically backs up your data by taking database snapshots and creating restore points. You could also do a self-service restore from these backup
Support for Azure Machine Learning
Azure SQL Data Warehouse is supported as both a source and destination for Azure ML Models.
Azure Stream Analytics
Azure Stream Analytics provides real-time, stream processing in the cloud. With ASA, you can query and analyze stream-based data while it is moving. Azure SQL Data Warehouse can be the output destination for Azure Stream Analytics.
Why Choose Cloud Over On-Premise Traditional Warehousing?
Some of the reasons,
- We do not need large capital expenses to get started with Azure Data Warehouse. We don’t need to procure servers, worry about server configuration, security compliances and also it save a lot of approvals.
- In another means we do not need staff to maintain hardware, virtualization and operating system.
- We can scale storage or performance and compute it up or down ‘ON DEMAND’*, while same thing is very cumbersome in the traditional ware house system.
- Cloud has very High Uptime (99.9%)
I hope the above reasons will help you to make up your mind in favor of Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
Until next time, ‘Happy Learning’!!