At Inspire, and on its official Azure blog, Microsoft says Azure SQL Data Warehouse will scale up the platform. The company says it is bumping the package to meet increasing demands of customers. SQL Data Warehouse customers need more data processing capabilities. Microsoft is responding by making relevant changes to its massive parallel processing (MPP) cloud relational database. The company understand customers now need “petabyte scale” analysis. To deal with the 1,000 TB scale, Data Warehouse will be upscaled to have computing power to 18,000 DWU (Data Warehouse Units). This is an increase from 6,000 DWU for the current package. Microsoft uses the DWU power measurement, which is an “abstracted measure of compute resources such as CPU, memory, and I/O bandwidth” and is used to assess warehouse performance. Because of this significant bump in computing power, Microsoft’s platform can support unlimited columnar storage. The announcement also reveals that Data Warehouse now has “PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 1, SOC 2 or SOC 3 compliance” At the moment, the upscaled performance is in preview: “With this preview, customers can scale their data warehouse workloads in Azure to new heights; driving answers to the most demanding analytical questions using our fully featured, enterprise class, SQL engine. Unlimited columnar storage is also important, as the diversity, variety and volume of customer data continues to grow at exponential rates.” It is worth noting that the new capability will not come cheap. Customers will need to pay $217.75 / hour do run the 18,000 DWU capabilities.
Microsoft 365
As mentioned, the company rolled out Microsoft 365 at Ignite today. It is a complete solution which combines Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security in one subscription package. Microsoft 365 will be offered in two bundles, Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business. For Microsoft 365 Enterprise, two different plans are available, Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 Enterprise E5.
