Microsoft Brings Simply Unmatched Scale to Big Data

Microsoft noted that the next iteration of Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a convergence between its data lake and data warehouse capabilities. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for business intelligence (BI) and machine learning applications. In addition, Synapse’s integrated security, management, and monitoring will help deliver blazing fast insights from all parts of your organization securely, and easily.

From a technical perspective, the new solution combines Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen 2, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Azure Data Factory for orchestration. And the innovation didn’t stop there. Microsoft also announced the debut of a Spark engine for SQL Server too! Combining these capabilities not only reinforces the market trend but also delivers greater flexibility and processing options for customers as more data moves to the cloud.

Microsoft believes that the new solution will reduce complexity and increase agility because customers no longer need to maintain two different types of data analytics work streams. One for the data warehouse and one for the data lake.

As a long-standing Microsoft partner, we at Qlik couldn’t be more excited be part of Microsoft’s launch and are looking forward to enabling our joint customers to rapidly harness the benefits of Azure Synapse.

“Qlik/Attunity has been a valued Microsoft partner for over 10 years. We look forward to our customers benefitting from Qlik/Attunity’ s expertise in real-time data ingestion and warehouse automation for Synapse”

– Daniel Yu, Director of Marketing, Microsoft Azure (Data & AI)

Microsoft’s innovation again underscores how dynamic and fluid the data market has become and how data architectures are continually changing. That’s why it’s crucial that as you build real-time data pipelines to support your strategic analytics and reporting initiatives, you select integration solutions that can easily adapt and respond to infrastructure changes with minimal disruption.

However, let’s not lose sight that it’s not all about technology. At Qlik, we believe the key to enabling customer’s analytics is to provide a vendor agnostic, automated, end-to-end streaming data pipeline that helps you deliver analytics ready data marts from your modern cloud data warehouse. The vendor agnosticism not only refers to multi-clouds and a variety of data sources, but also extends to different visualization solutions too. We think Qlik Sense is great but realize you might use others too. You only need to look to our customer “Save the Children”. They are a great example of one of many customers who have modernized their data lake and warehouse infrastructure with Qlik and Microsoft Azure. They have a great story of using Microsoft data solutions to deliver analytics data and use PowerBI for insights and visualization. They tell their story in a video here.

But “Save the Children” is just one example of data warehouse modernization. In fact, we’ve seen a tremendous resurgence in cloud deployments as of late. So much so, that you could say that “data warehousing has made a comeback”. I coincidentally discussed this topic on a webinar with David Stodder from TDWI and Noel Yuhanna, Principal Analyst from Forrester. Check out the great discussion here: “The Data Warehouse Comeback: How the Cloud is Accelerating Insights”.

Finally, if you prefer the personal touch and want to see how Qlik and Microsoft work together then we’re currently running a 14-city roadshow in North America. Register in a city near you and experience how we can help you modernize your data estate with Azure SQL Data Warehouse through real-time data integration and data warehouse automation. Use this link to sign up today.

In summary, we know that to lead in the digital age where real-time decisions are critical, you need to be able to easily access and analyze the latest and most accurate data. As we’ve stated, many customers are re-architecting their data lake and warehouse infrastructures to support that objective and to leverage the latest technology. So, while it looked like traditional data warehousing was going to strike out, cloud data warehouse innovation continues to swing for the fences.

Qlik and Microsoft have co-authored a new book entitled “Data Warehouse Automation in Azure” that explains the cost advantages, time to value, and how to work with real-time data in Azure SQL Data Warehouse for analytics initiatives. Download your free copy today!