Kurt Shintaku's Blog

I got asked the question:

“What the heck is a Data Lake? And what’s an Azure SQL DW?” 

We opened the Microsoft BUILD 2015 keynote with a discussion around something called “Data Lakes” and “Azure SQL DW”. (I believe Richard Campbell from the .NET Rocks podcast joked, that we start with Data Lakes because there’s an Ocean of data that is going to be hitting everyone – a result of Internet of Things (IoT).)

In a nutshell, a Data Lake allows every type of data to be kept without discrimination regardless of its size, structure, or how fast it is ingested. Organizations can then use Hadoop or advanced analytics to find patterns of the data. Data lakes can also serve as a repository for lower cost data preparation prior to moving curated data into a data warehouse.

As for Azure SQL Datawarehouses, developers building software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications can now leverage SQL Database to gain the flexibility to support both explosive growth and profitable business models. For workloads with unpredictable resources demands, our elastic database technology provides you with the ability to create a pool of database and allocate resources which can be shared across the database pool.

Read more here:

• SCOTT GUTHRIE: New services for intelligent apps + tools and runtimes for any platform & every device
  http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/29/new-services-for-intelligent-apps-tools-and-runtimes-for-any-platform-every-device/
• BLOG: Introducing Azure Data Lake
  http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/29/introducing-azure-data-lake/
• BLOG: Microsoft Announces Azure SQL Database elastic database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Data Lake
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2015/04/29/microsoft-announces-azure-sql-database-elastic-database-azure-sql-data-warehouse-azure-data-lake.aspx