SQL Data Warehouse
- Truly elastic with decoupled compute and storage
- Set up in minutes, scale in seconds
- Built for intelligence
- Enterprise-ready with 99.9% SLA
- Global availability with 23 regions worldwide
- Pay only for what you use
Learn about Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a SQL-based, fully-managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse. It’s highly elastic, and it enables you to set up in minutes and scale capacity in seconds. Scale compute and storage independently, which allows you to burst compute for complex analytical workloads, or scale down your warehouse for archival scenarios, and pay based on what you're using instead of being locked into predefined cluster configurations—and get more cost efficiency versus traditional data warehouse solutions.
Provision fast, and scale even faster
Get true cloud elasticity, provision a data warehouse in under five minutes, and scale compute in a few seconds—which means you don’t have to over-provision. Simply scale up when you need to, and then scale down to keep cost in check.
"We are using Azure SQL Data Warehouse’s elasticity and scaling capabilities to scale up our systems when we need to do analytics on all the data we are collecting from thousands of devices, and then scale down, thus optimizing on cost without compromising performance."
Pay only for what you use
Pay for what you use, instead of being locked into the predefined cluster configurations of traditional data warehouse solutions. Compute and storage are separated, so you can bring in all of your data—with no trade-offs on which data to ingest—and run compute only on the datasets that matter. Also, SQL Data Warehouse gives you the unique option to pause compute, which means more freedom to better manage your cloud costs.
"We switched from AWS Redshift to Azure SQL Data Warehouse, migrating over 7 TB of uncompressed data over a week for the simple reasons of saving money and enabling a more straightforward implementation for advanced analytics."
Trust automatic threat detection
Manage, detect, and mitigate security threats with automatic threat detection and Azure authentication features. Built-in auditing and threat detection use machine learning to understand the patterns of your workload and serve as an alarm system to alert you of a potential breach.
"Threat Detection is an incredible feature, super simple to use, empowering our small engineering team to protect our company data without the need to be security experts...Knowing that Microsoft is using its vast security expertise to protect my data gives me incredible peace of mind."
Plan mission critical
Plan for reliability with a market-leading SLA that gives you 99.9% uptime in regions available to the public. Broad compliance certifications, and a datacenter network that has the most coverage worldwide, allow you to you lead your growth strategy with Microsoft as a partner.
"Our vision is to expand Adcorp …. throughout Africa, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region, Azure is well-positioned to support our aggressive growth strategy and we have confidence in the partnership that has been established with Microsoft."
Get insights from big data and advanced analytics
Built into SQL Data Warehouse, PolyBase simplifies and enables distributed analytics, and allows you to run a single Transact-SQL query over multiple data sources, including Azure Data Lake Store. PolyBase also gives you rapid data ingestion from within the same query tooling experience. Plus, compatibility with other services, such as Azure Machine Learning and products from Looker Data Sciences, allow you to run analytics across your data and transform your business.
"With Azure SQL Data Warehouse, we use PolyBase to ingest data from Azure HDInsight then run thousands of analytical queries per day over tens of billions of records—about 20 TB of data. This enables us to monitor price history and market dynamics to adjust pricing and ensure we’re offering our customers the best price."
Build on the familiar SQL Server platform
Use the familiar SQL language and develop with ease in a rich programming environment. Powered by the innovations of SQL Server 2016, SQL Data Warehouse gives you capabilities such as the industry-leading SQL Server 2016 columnstore for faster analytics queries.
“It’s not Hive, it’s not uSQL, it’s not another language that you have to pick up, SQL is a language that all DBAs know like the back of their hand.”
SQL Data Warehouse blog
Pinned Post SQL Data Warehouse now supports seamless integration with Azure Data Lake Store
07 Feb 2017
Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a SQL-based fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud solution for data warehousing. SQL Data Warehouse is highly elastic, enabling you to provision in minutes and scale…
Handling data encoding issues while loading data to SQL Data Warehouse
05 Jul 2017
This blog is intended to provide insights on some of the data encoding issues that you may encounter while using Polybase to load data to SQL Data Warehouse.
Microsoft Enterprise Services Tips to using SQL Data Warehouse effectively
16 Feb 2017
Microsoft ES shares 8 tips to using SQL Data Warehouse effectively
Get started
Not sure how to begin?
See a step-by-step guide to get started with SQL Data Warehouse, and then learn common SQL Data Warehouse best practices.
Developer? Right this way.
Drive insights through a single SQL–based view across all of your data sources. Use Transact-SQL queries across relational and non-relational data. Dig deeper into authentication and connections, Dynamic SQL, stored procedures, user-defined schemas, and views.
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