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It's sooo much more than a data warehouse! Microsoft beams over new appliance update

Analytics Platform System made generally available

Alexander J Martin Wed 30 Nov 2016 // 15:04 UTC

Microsoft has made its latest appliance update generally available, reminding users that PolyBase exists and that SQL Server isn't just a boring old data warehouse.

Redmond's Analytics Platform System (APS) is a scale-orientated, parallel-processing, fully integrated platform for data warehouse workloads, and is now generally available.

APS hosts the SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) and Microsoft wants customers to know it's sooo much more than a data warehouse thanks to Hadoop-integration tool PolyBase.

Where users with unstructured data might have been somewhat underwhelmed by SQL Server to date, PolyBase allows them to access and combine both non-relational and relational data within SQL Server, allowing them to run queries on external data in Hadoop or Azure blob storage.

The new APS update now supports the latest Hortonworks Data Platform versions, 2.4 and 2.5, letting SQL shops leverage the product for analytics.

APS builds on the SQL Server 2016 release with additional language coverage to support migrations from SQL Server and other platforms, too, and delivered improved security features for hybrid scenarios, as well as the signature moves of any Redmond update; bug fixes through firmware and driver updates.

PolyBase is there so users can melt PDW data in with Hadoop data from multiple sources, including Hortonworks on Windows Server, Hortonworks on Linux, Cloudera on Linux, HDInsight's Windows Azure blob storage, and HDInsight on Analytics Platform System.

The idea is that such integration and access to Microsoft's BI tools will make APS an integrated analytics platform to keep customers happy when using SQL Server.

APS ships to data centres as an appliance with hardware and software pre-installed and pre-configured to run multiple workloads. When users purchase APS, they're also purchasing Compute nodes for PDW with the option of purchasing additional nodes for HDInsight according to their business requirements. ®

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