So, if you have been living under a rock for the last year (and yes, he really is president), you may not have heard that SQL Server 2017 launched yesterday, and it runs on Linux!!! If you want to know more about that you can read my article over at Redmond mag. SQL Server 2017 will be released next Monday, October 2nd. But there were a lot of other Microsoft data platform announcements, that you might have missed, because I know I did, and I watched the keynote and stood in the SQL Server booth all day.
- Azure SQL Database Machine Learning Support—If you are using a premium Azure SQL Database you can now take advantage of R and most of the goodies that are available in SQL Server. You can learn more about that here. Python isn’t there yet, and some options are limited, but it’s a nice start
- SSIS as a Service Public Preview—Anyone who has tried to use Azure Data Factory, well hi, Meagan! There’s a new release of ADF that will support using SSIS packages, which should make the service much more friendly to use. You can learn more about that here.
- Public Preview of Managed Instances—We’ve been hearing a little bit about this for a while, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of the private preview. This is hybrid PaaS/IaaS product, that will be easy to migrate to. It will also have the added bonus of allowing you to bring your own license to the party. This isn’t quite available yet, but based on yesterday’s announcement, should be soon. There’s a little bit of info in this post from Microsoft.
- SQL Data Warehouse BIG SCALE—Do you have a Neteeza? Are you sick of paying them $500k/yr for support? Azure SQL Data Warehouse has a solution for you (bring a black card only, please). You can go up to 18,000 DWUs using NVMe hardware in the cloud. This offering is aimed at large customers who want to remove expensive on-premises appliances and get the flexibility that the cloud offers.
- Azure SQL Database vNet Support—This is something that a lot of a customers have been asking for in Azure SQL DB. The ability to not have a public facing endpoint (even though you could lock it down), but it can allow you have total isolation. The bigger benefit of this is that you can allow more granularity in what connects to your SQL DBs from Azure. You can learn more about the preview here.
There are a lot of announcements this week, and not a lot of time in the keynotes to get to them all. So I thought this might be helpful.
