Microsoft Azure Data Platform Capability Expands Yet Again

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Yet again, Microsoft builds on their increasingly compelling Data Platform story by bringing out new offerings.
As my colleague Stan Tartinovksy wrote last week, Azure Data Warehouse is coming.   But that’s not the only new piece of the Microsoft data environment.
Also announced at the Ignite 2015 conference was a new Elastic Databases feature for Azure SQL Database.  This feature is ideal for developers who build SaaS applications that use large numbers of databases to scale to unpredictable resource demands.   Rather than needing to overprovision in order to accommodate peak demand, developers and sysadmins will be able to use Elastic Databases to configure a database pool to help share resources across multiple databases (upwards of thousands) within a controllable budget   Microsoft will also be making tools available to help query and aggregate results, as well as to implement policies and perform transactions across the database pool.
And the other major new offering is Azure Data Lake.  A Data Lake is a hyper-scale data store for big data analytic workloads, designed as a single place to store every type of data in its native format, with no fixed limits on account size or file size, and with high throughput to increase analytic performance.  Azure Data Lake is a Hadoop File System, compatible integrated with Azure HDInsight.  It will also be integrated with Revolution-R Enterprise and industry standard Hadoop distributions like Hortonworks and Cloudera, not to mention supporting individual Hadoop projects like Storm, Spark, Kafka, Flume, etc.
Elastic Databases for Azure SQL Database is currently in preview.  Azure Data Lake will be released to preview later in 2015.