Posts Tagged ‘SQL Database’

When I speak to clients about In-Memory features in SQL Server, I find that Columnstore indexes just haven’t gained much traction as a marquee feature. The functionality itself is quite useful in the BI/DW realm as far as potentially boosting query performance by 1.5 to 10 times. But I think it gets overlooked because the […]

The age of Big Data is upon us, and the age of Pervasive (or “Ambient”) Data is rapidly approaching. This means that not only the typical loosely-structured Big Data sources that we’ve become accustomed to considering, like Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and web logs. This also means we’re dealing with the streams of data generated […]

As early as the beginning of this year, Microsoft began positioning their “Cloud OS” concept, based on the pillars of Windows Server and Microsoft (formerly Windows) Azure.  This perspective on the spectrum of Microsoft’s offerings casts Cloud OS as a giant next generation operating system, with all the scope and scalability that cloud computing offers. […]

One of the most effective ways to improve application performance is to implement data caching. Most of the applications are relatively retrieving the same data from external sources like database of web service and if that source data is never or seldom changes then application is just wasting CPU time and I/O querying the source […]

Facebook has been one of the software pioneers when it comes to Big Data.  They have an continuously increasing amount of data that constantly needs to be indexed and queried in a fast, efficient manner.  Facebook originally developed Hive which is a distributed data warehouse that allows for querying and managing of large data sets.  They released […]

A Brief Background In my previous posts I have walked through setting up Hadoop on Windows Azure using HDInsight.  Hadoop is an extremely powerful distributed computing platform with the ability to process terabytes of data.  Many of the situations when you hear the term “Big Data”, Hadoop is the enabler.  One of the complications with […]

Edit: Part 3 using Mahout here In my previous post I described the basics of HDInsight on Windows Azure and an example of what a Hadoop cluster can do for you. Without further delay, lets build a cluster!  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account go here and sign up (it’s free!!) Setup […]

I’m going to use the theme of an earlier post (Windows Azure SQL Database what’s missing?) and ask the same question on another service offered on Windows Azure. The reason I chose these offerings specifically is because I really like them as a developer. Not having to deal with configuring infrastructure and being able to […]

You may hear this from almost any vendor whose original software was built for an on-premise installation.  “Look, we are on the cloud. Our product has an image on Amazon AWS. It takes just minutes to provision this pre-existing image and you are off and running.” I love the concept of that. I love the […]

Being primarily a developer, I would prefer not having to manage infrastructure. With SQL Database I don’t have too. SQL Database provides most of the features I need when working with a relational database. If SQL Database doesn’t suit your needs, you can have SQL Server running in a VM within Windows Azure. Though again […]

Before I started blogging for Perficient, I had a few posts on a personal blog. One of the post, though outdated, is still referenced quite often. So I thought it might be a good idea to update the post for use with SQL Reporting. The original post was created for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). […]

Previously, we addressed the specifics of data services in Azure, and what paths might be valid for SQL Server BI.   Today, we’ll look at delivering data to users — the “last mile” of Microsoft’s cloud BI story — via SharePoint. Whenever you talk about delivery of Microsoft BI, the first point of discussion is logically […]