SQL DW Gen2 is Here

By Jerry Hawk, Capax Global CEO and Managing Partner

Azure SQL Data Warehouse has always been a central component of the way we approach modernizing our customer’s analytical capability at Capax. When we work with a customer to turn them from legacy to today and beyond, one of the most important factors in that transition is building a centralized data warehouse that sets the stage — and delivers — both flexibility and performance while allowing the customer to start small and grow to enterprise-scale. With Gen2 going into General Availability today, that journey just got even better for our customers.

But to fully understand the value, we should start at the beginning. It begins with the ease at which we can bring Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW) into a customer’s environment. Without having to interrupt existing warehousing and reporting, SQL DW gives us the ability to immediately stand up a customer that is using other technologies including non-Microsoft, for ETL/ELT, and built-in telemetry that allows us to get our solution up and running quickly. SQL DW shows immediate value without having to migrate every portion of the customer’s existing stack.

We’ve delivered countless proof of value engagements that include MicroStrategy, Informatica, and Salesforce data platforms and our customers are always impressed with just how fast we can get these systems going with no impact on existing reporting workloads. Never has the “try before you buy” mentality been more critical. We see data warehouse projects as one of the most misunderstood types of IT projects. Gone are the days of the large, multi-department requirements gathering meetings, the months and months of design and build, and the year-long project with the costs and impacts associated.

We see data warehouse projects as one of the most misunderstood types of IT projects.

We were already doing well, but many new advantages come with Gen2’s increased capability, better performance, increased concurrency and vastly expanded integration features. Slicing and dicing of larger datasets are critical for machine learning, and other types of “analytical” reduction and Gen2 delivers as it can cover many Spark scenarios in a much faster way.

We’re finding that the increased concurrency (4X — we can now serve 128 concurrent queries from a single cluster) makes most traditional application and analytical-based workloads suitable for Gen2. In one customer alone, partitioning data using Azure SQL Data Warehouse Gen2 reduced the time window from 14 hours to 92 minutes. For more traditional data warehouse workloads the order of magnitude improvement has also been there — we see from 5x-100x time reductions depending on the scenario.

Partitioning data using Azure SQL Data Warehouse Gen2 reduced the time window from 14 hours to 92 minutes

Just some of the benefits of Gen2 include: quick to stand up, globally available (33 Azure regions, the most global available of all cloud data warehouse services), high degree of data control (Transparent Data Encryption), and its ability to easily integrate with Data Bricks for both push and pull via Polybase to enable a hybrid scenario where spark and SQL DW are interconnected. We believe Azure SQL Data Wearhouse Gen2 gives our customers best in breed compute and quite quickly takes them from “table setting” to “there” on their modern analytics journey.