A beginner's guide to Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse

It is the time when we are surrounded by technology all around. We have seen so much in this little period that we cannot imagine living lives without technology. It has captivated every aspect of our lives. Be it our personal lives or our work lives. As far as we can say, the best is yet to come. Things started getting more influential with the innovation of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is the term we use for the services we acquire to store and access our data over the internet, and you can analyze and process this data as well. These services are offered by a cloud service provider, and you do not need to have any storing capacity at your end. You use their servers and databases to store your data and access it whenever you want to. It is called cloud computing because of being available over the internet. And, as it all happens over the internet, that is why the cloud is there.

There are many cloud service providers, but three are prominent ones. That includes Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. In today's world, data analytics is in demand and for that, we need some platform that can process and store a large amount of data. It should be a platform that can scale up and down whenever necessary. Microsoft is the one that offered a platform to fulfill all these needs. It was a data warehouse, and they called it Microsoft Azure SQL data warehouse.

What is Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse?

Almost a decade ago, there used to be traditional data warehouses. These warehouses used to handle data with some limitations. But at that time, it was all acceptable for business owners, as they had no other option. With time, demands have changed, and businesses now want to analyze data in real-time. There is one technology that came up to take the challenge that is Azure SQL data warehouse.

Microsoft Azure SQL data warehouse is a service of the cloud computing platform offered by Microsoft. It is an analytical data warehouse that is based on the SQL server. It has the capability of processing a large amount of data in parallel. Its consistency and scalability are what make it a service with high-performance computing.

How Azure Data Warehouse overcomes Traditional Drawbacks?

The architecture of Microsoft Azure data warehouse is designed in a way that it takes care of every demand of the modern world. It has the feature that enables you to store data at multiple places, which leads to parallel processing. If you are new and want to learn it thoroughly, you can join our training program.

Azure Data Warehouse Architecture

The architecture of Azure data warehouse, like most of the databases,  couple their storage with computing powers. The Microsoft Azure data warehouse is based on a master-slave architecture with the power of parallel processing. Master, in this case, is the control node and slave is the compute node.

The query execution plan is generated by the control node. It breaks all the queries into different phases and distributes them to the compute node to be executed parallelly. All the query metadata is all there in the control node.

Compute nodes are responsible to compute all the data that is stored, in all of its instances. After all the process is done, they send the result to the control node.

Advantages of Azure Data Warehouse

If we compare Microsoft Azure data warehouse with the traditional databases, Azure data house will be ahead by a good mile. There are a lot of advantages of Azure warehouse that makes it a distinguish database. Let's look at some of the advantages that are enough to make anyone go for this.

  • Parallel Processing and Elastic Scaling

Parallel processing architecture (MPP) is the base of the Microsoft Azure data warehouse. It is the architecture that also powers the Analytics Platform Systems (APS). Azure database keeps computing nodes (slaves) and data storage apart from each other. Azure Page Blob is where we store data, and Azure Virtual Machine is what we use to deploy compute nodes. This is called decoupling, and it helps it to be an elastic data warehouse. It can scale computing capacity and storage capacity whenever we need it. Well, you can learn a lot more about it by taking Azure data training online.

  • End-to-End Platform Built

The Microsoft Azure data warehouse is a distributed processing system with additional capabilities because it is based on the Microsoft SQL Server. You can just acquire the services and start working without getting worried about the steep learning curve because it does not have one. It is always ready to go kind of database. And, you can always integrate it with other Azure platforms like HDInsight, Power BI, Azure data factory, and others.

  • Market Leading Price and Performance

As we know, in the Azure data warehouse, all the compute nodes and data storage are apart, and the scaling of computing and storage are also independent of each other. The performance of this database is automatically very high. And, pricing is also very minimal, as you pay for the service until you are using it. You can always pause compute resources when not required.

  • In-memory Cloumnstore

As Azure data warehouse is based on the SQL server, so it also supports the storage mechanism of SQL server, like row-wise and column-wise mechanism. It also improves the speed and can go up to 100x.

  • Security and Protection

When it comes to security, it has multiple layers of protection. It allows you to put security on the firewall to restrict any kind of access. You always enter through the proper identity verification process.

In the end, we can conclude it in a way that it is a highly scalable database platform provided by Microsoft. That has both the features of processing the data and storing it. We have described it here and also stated all the advantages it has, over the traditional data warehouses. You can contact our experts if you want to know anything more about Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse.