Microsoft Announces New Big Data Azure Services

Microsoft announced several new features targeting Big Data processing including support for HDInsights on Ubuntu Linux, as well as a set of new features in their Data Lake services.

The first announcement was of the availability of HDInsights, Microsoft’s Hadoop services, on Ubuntu Linux virtual machines.  Features include the ability to create HDInsight clusters from the Azure Portal and the ability to install other Hadoop components or applications.

Today’s new release also enables additional capabilities, such as, cluster scaling, virtual network integration and script action support. Furthermore, in addition to Hadoop cluster type, you can now create HBase and Storm clusters on Linux for your NoSQL and real time processing needs such as building an IoT application.  — Scott Guthrie’s Blog

Microsoft also announced new features in their Data Lake services including renaming Azure Data Lake to Azure Data Lake Store, a service for storing and sharing large amounts of data of any shape or type.  They also announced Azure Data Lake Analytics, a service built on Apache YARN that allows analysis of data stored in Data Lake store, SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Azure SQL Data Warehouses.  Also introduced is a new U-SQL language.  Designed to be similar to SQL, this language combines SQL syntax with code and is scalable across multiple instances for analyzing big data across multiple stores.

To learn more about today’s announcements, visit Scott Guthrie’s Blog or the SQL Server Blog.