Introduction To Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Introduction

Azure SQL data warehouse is a fully-managed and scalable Cloud Service. It is not only compatible with several other Azure offerings, such as Machine Learning and Data Factory, but also with various existing SQL Server tools and Microsoft products. It talks with Power BI.

According to Microsoft, Azure SQL data warehouse can support petabytes of data and be scaled up and down in a matter of minutes-or even seconds-with computing and storage.

The users need to pay only for what they need when they need it.

Background

Traditional data warehouse/ large machine at client building was very expensive to maintain and very difficult to manage.

Cloud has now come to change this scenario totally with incredible SQL component compatibility and unmatched performance.

Prerequisite – SQL Server administration and Data warehousing knowledge.

Points of Interest
Azure data warehouse perfectly leverages the existing development of a project and new features. We will discuss the points, mentioned below.

1. Difference between Azure Data warehouse vs. large machine at client building [locations data warehouse].
2. Designing of Azure data warehouse (will do practice/walkthrough).
3. Loading and migrating the data.
4. Workload management.
5. Sample/ Practical of Azure data warehouse (Complete LIVE show).

To begin with,the main concepts of the SQL data warehouse are Provisioning, designing and maintaining. Similarly we have abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism for programming languages.

Let’s start

• Data warehouse
• Advantage of Cloud data warehousing
• Billing and provisioning of a Data warehouse

What is Azure SQL Data warehouse?

• It is a Service, which lives on Microsoft Azure. It a platform as a Service (Paas) offering
• It’s a massive parallel processing system.
• Supports distributed storage and computing.

SMP Vs MPP

Symmetric Multiprocessing Vs. Massively Parallel Processing is mentioned below.





SMP  Symmetric Multiprocessing
MPP Multiple Parallel Processing

Data Warehousing Unit

DWU is a measure of the underlying computing power of the database.

We don’t need to worry about system configuration like RAM, hard drive etc. Does it sound great? It’s just the beginning, my friends. Let me share with you, the example, mentioned below.



I should expect 5 times performance improvement in the above case.

Please note the current offering from AZURE Delaware house is from 100 DWU to 6000 DWU.

Why Choose Cloud Over On-Premise Traditional Warehousing?

My way of thinking gives me the reasons, mentioned below for the same:

You do not need large capital expenses to get started. So you need to procure servers, decide server configuration, security compliances and a lot of approvals. In another way, we do not need staff to maintain hardware, virtualization and an operating system.

We can scale the storage and compute up or down on demand, while the same thing is very cumbersome in the traditional warehouse system.

How does the Service get billed?



When not in use, compute power of the data warehouse can be completely paused for maximum savings.

Let’s do some practice to understand it better.

Go to https://azure.microsoft.com/ and click on the Pricing column.



Scroll down a bit and click on the SQL Data Warehouse.



You will land on this page.



Here, you can check the costs, as per your business need.





Now, go to DashBoard.



I think the reasons mentioned above will have made up your mind to move ahead with the warehouse. Now, let’s talk about provisioning the data warehouse. 



https://portal.azure.com/?whr=live.com&nocdn=true#create/hub - New - Databases -SQL data warehouse.



Fill the details like Database name, Subscription, Resource group and Server location. Please select the Server location, as per your geography.



Select DWU unit, as per your business need and click create.



You can chooses DWU /Performance Bar as per your business need and the default is 100.



After creating, it will show ‘Deployment Started’. Give the process a couple of minutes to complete.

Once complete, try to connect with SQL.



Go to the database. Click on the Firewall and click OK.



Now, you will be able to connect and perform all CRUD operations.



I hope, you enjoyed how to use Azure SQL data warehouse. I will be publishing a new article on Azure data warehouse with extensive details later.