Having access to a lot of data is not enough, what matters is how you consume it.
According to a recent study, organizations lose over $600 billion a year because of improper data storage and analysis. While the organizations capable of properly storing and analyzing their business data witness an average 8% increase in revenues and a 10% reduction in costs.
Consequently, most organizations today are on the lookout for a trusted Date Warehousing solution. Microsoft’s Azure Data Warehouse delivers organizations with a robust platform to store and protect their business-critical data.
To provide a quick overview, Azure Data Warehouse is a highly elastic and scalable cloud service that provides organizations with a holistic view of their data and enables the quick extraction of key insights. An enterprise data warehouse is a good place to consolidate disparate data, manage, structure, and analyze it identifying the gaps and gain new insights for informed decision making and enhanced business intelligence.
Prominent Features of Azure Data Warehouse
Organizations today are looking for a viable cloud data warehouse that stores large-volume data, shapes it, processes it quickly in bulk according to the query, thereby turning data into great insights. That’s where Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse serves the purpose with excellence.
- Highly elastic and scalable: Azure data warehouse enables organizations to scale up, scale down, pause, and resume operations or computations as per the requirement.
- Separate compute and storage: It keeps computing separate from storage so the processes are done quickly without occupying all additional space.
- Support for SQL-based database: It supports SQL-based database solutions including SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Azure data warehouse offers a combination of SQL Server relational database and Azure cloud scale-out capabilities.
- Integrated platform: Just like other Azure services, it has the same scalability and consistency as high-performance computing.
- Hybrid infrastructure: It supports on-premises data centers, private clouds, and/or public clouds.
Benefits of Azure Data Warehouse
- Application support: Azure Data Warehouse supports more than 200 products on technologies including IoT, AI/ML, Blockchain, Analytics, Containers, and Database.
- Compatibility: It loads data from anywhere quickly using SQL Server tools. It is compatible with other Azure offerings such as Azure Synapse, Azure Data Factory, and other Microsoft products.
- Security-focused: Just like other Microsoft services, Azure Data Warehouse keeps data security as a top priority. Microsoft Azure implements rigorous security measures such as row-level security, data masking, encryption, auditing, etc. to overcome various security concerns regarding cloud infrastructure.
- Parallel processing: Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse can process a huge amount of data simultaneously through parallel processing which means users get insightful reports quickly.
- PolyBase: PolyBase in Azure Data Warehouse enables users to run queries across unstructured data or non-relational data.
Why Organizations Prefer Azure for Data Warehousing?
Today, organizations of all sizes and across industries are heavily investing in solutions that can offer cost-efficiencies, elasticity, and hyper-scale of cloud for their large data warehouses. Azure SQL Data Warehouse is one of the best cloud data warehouses and caters to all demands of enterprises by providing a single platform to process large volumes of data. Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse has emerged as a major player with a growing user count. Below are some aspects that organizations best love about Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse.
- Enterprise-class cloud data warehouse built on SQL Server: Azure Data Warehouse uses the T-SQL constructs that enterprises are already familiar with, for seamless migration. Its default integrations with Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse, Azure Machine Learning, and Power BI enable the users to ingest data, utilize learning algorithms, and visualize data to strengthen their data-driven business strategies.
- Hybrid infrastructure: Earlier customers would have to shift their entire infrastructure to the cloud if they wanted cloud data computing. However, solutions such as Azure Data Warehouse allows organizations to leverage a hybrid infrastructure and move their computing to the cloud without any hassles. It enables organizations to use tools which they are familiar with to access, manage, manipulate and visualize data for faster insights and serve fulfill business user cases.
- Pause to save costs: Cloud migration requires moving data and applications to the cloud which was traditionally a complex task. It required creating a backup of the data, clearing the existing cluster, and then restoring the data. The process was not only complex but time-consuming too. With the Azure Data Warehouse’s dynamic pause feature, customers can optimize the use of computing infrastructure as per their need, saving cost in infrastructure.
- PolyBase in the cloud can combine both structured and unstructured data into data sets easily: Combining structured and unstructured data together was cumbersome task. However, Azure SQL Data Warehouse uses Transact-SQL skills to combine structured and semi-structured data stored in Azure Storage, Hortonworks Data Platform, or Cloudera irrespective of the storage type. This enables enterprises to store and process their data faster at low costs.
- Separation of compute and storage: Leveraging Azure SQL Data Warehouse, organizations can independently scale compute and storage. This helps them to identify what they need and pay for their required services. They only have to pay for the query performance they need without thinking about their future requirements. Organizations can utilize the components and scale resources based on their present and growing needs.
Script your Data Story with Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse and AgreeYa
It is evident from the above facts that Azure Data Warehouse enables organizations to get better insights and allows data scientists to tell better data stories. The solution is built for the modern age, where data is the new fuel. At AgreeYa we recently helped a healthcare major transform its entire organization into a data-driven entity with our Azure Data Warehouse solution. If you want to learn more Contact us.