Microsoft today announced that Azure HDInsight is now available for all customers in China as a public preview, making it the first global cloud provider to have a publicly available cloud Hadoop offering in China. With this launch, Microsoft is bringing Azure HDInsight’s ability to process big data volumes from unstructured and semi-structured sources to…Read more
Microsoft Azure continues to offer customers more reasons why Azure Virtual Machines are an ideal place to develop, test and run your SQL Server applications. This promise is further enhanced with the release of new workload optimized images for SQL Server that provide greater performance and simplified setup when it comes to running data warehousing…Read more
We are delighted to announce the release of new optimized SQL Server images in the Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines Gallery. These images are pre-configured with optimizations for transactional and Data Warehousing workloads respectively by baking in our performance best practices for running SQL in Azure VMs. What preconfigured VM images are available? The following four…Read more
We are excited to announce that the new SQL Database service tiers, Basic, Standard, and Premium are now generally available. These service tiers raise the bar for what you can expect from a database-as-a-service with business-class functionality that is both built-in and seamless to use—allowing you to dramatically increase the number of databases managed under…Read more
I am pleased to announce previews of new NoSQL database and search services and the evolution of our Hadoop-based service. Available as previews today are Azure DocumentDB, a fully-managed transactional NoSQL document database-as-a-service, and Azure Search, which enables developers to easily add search capabilities to mobile and cloud applications. Generally available today, Azure HDInsight, our…Read more
If you’re considering backing up your SQL Server database to the cloud, there are many compelling reasons. Not only will you have an offsite copy of your data for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes, but you can save on CAPEX by using Microsoft Azure for cost-effective storage. And now, you can choose to backup…Read more
A few days ago, I published a post with some anticipated questions & answers to provide details on the new service tiers for Microsoft Azure SQL Database, announced on April 24. In this follow-up post, I want to provide more information about how SQL Database performance is factored into the service tiers. Like the previous…Read more
Earlier this month, we celebrated the launch of Microsoft SQL Server 2014, announced that the Analytics Platform System is generally available, and shared a preview of the Intelligent Systems Service. Quentin Clark summarized his keynote speech at the Accelerate Your Insights event in a blog post entitled, “The data platform for a new era.” If…Read more
With the recently disclosed general availability of SQL Server 2014, Microsoft brings to market new hybrid scenarios, enabling customers to take advantage of Microsoft Azure in conjunction with on-premises SQL Server. SQL Server 2014 helps customers to protect their data and make it more highly availably using Azure. SQL Server Backup to Microsoft Azure builds…Read more
We are happy to announce the availability of StockTrader 6, a new end-to-end reference application for Windows Azure and Windows Azure SQL Database. The focus of the sample is two-fold: Cloud-connected mobile applications: Illustrate how to adapt existing applications and services to extend the reach to all major mobile platforms, including Apple iPhone/iPad, Android devices,…Read more
The history of SQL Server dates back to 1989 when the product came about as a result of a partnership between Microsoft, Sybase, and Ashton-Tate. SQL Server has evolved tremendously over the years and now Microsoft is getting ready to bring SQL Server 2012 to market, beginning with the SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event…Read more
In October at the PASS Summit 2011, Microsoft announced expanded investments in “Big Data”, including a new Apache Hadoop™ based distribution for Windows Server and service for Windows Azure. In doing so, we extended Microsoft’s leadership in BI and Data Warehousing, enabling our customers to glean and manage insights for any data, any size, anywhere….Read more
