Microsoft has just announced the release of Azure Data Warehouse to general availability. Azure DW is a fully managed data warehouse that leverages elastic and hyper scale database cloud technologies to provide massively scalable SQL capabilities.
Azure SQL Data Warehouse uses an elastic massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture built on top of the industry-leading SQL Server 2016 database engine. It allows you to interactively query and analyze data using the broad set of existing SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications that you use today. It uses column stores for high performance analytics and storage compression, a rich collection of aggregation capabilities of SQL Server, and state of the art query optimization capabilities. With built-in capabilities such as Polybase, it allows you to query Hadoop systems directly, enabling a single SQL-based query surface for all your data.
Azure DW comes with a number of features including polybase for combining HD Insight and SQL queries, very fast scaling, transparent encryption, auditing, threat detection and Active Directory integration.
