Fresh from last week's Build developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft executives appeared at the company's first-ever Ignite conference in Chicago and provided more details about the company's new Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
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Posted by David Ramel on 05/05/20150 comments
Forget all that techy Azure Big Data stuff -- Microsoft found a new way to put databases to work that's really interesting: guessing your age from your photo.
Threatening to upstage all the groundbreaking announcements at the Build conference is a Web site where you provide a photo and Microsoft's magical machinery consults a database of face photos to guess the age of the subjects.
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Posted by David Ramel on 05/01/20150 comments
A new Azure SQL Data Warehouse preview offered as a counter to Amazon's Redshift headed several data-related announcements at the opening of the Microsoft Build conference today.
Also being announced were Azure Data Lake and "elastic databases" for Azure SQL Database, further demonstrating the company's focus on helping customers implement and support a "data culture" in which analytics are used for everyday business decisions.
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Posted by David Ramel on 04/29/20150 comments
Despite all the publicity around Big Data and Apache Hadoop, a new database deployment survey indicates traditional, structured relational database management systems (RDBMS) still reign among enterprises, with SQL Server dueling Oracle for the overall lead.
Also, the new survey commissioned by Dell Software shows the use of traditional structured data is growing even faster than unstructured data, so the findings aren't just an example of a larger installed user base being eroded by upstart technologies.
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Posted by David Ramel on 04/21/20150 comments
SQL skills pay well and the technology is among the most popular as indicated by a big new developer survey from Stack Overflow, which tracked everything from caffeine consumption to indentation preferences.
While Objective-C was reported as the most lucrative technology to learn -- garnering an average salary of $98,828 in the U.S. -- SQL wasn't far behind, coming in at No. 5 on the list with an average reported salary of $91,431 in the U.S.
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Posted by David Ramel on 04/14/20150 comments
Forrester Research Inc. analyst Boris Evelson said existing approaches to business intelligence (BI) need updating in the modern world, and converging them with Big Data technologies requires more than traditional DBMS systems such as SQL Server can provide.
BI is alive and well in the age of Big Data and will continue to enjoy a thriving market, Evelson said, but the world is constantly changing and more innovation is needed.
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Posted by David Ramel on 03/27/20150 comments
Idera Inc. announced new suites for managing SQL Servers, providing performance monitoring, automated maintenance, security features and more.
Known for its performance monitoring solutions, the Houston-based company renamed its primary management suite from SQL Suite to SQL Management Suite and launched three new software packages for specific functionalities.
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Posted by David Ramel on 03/19/20150 comments
Continuing the company's shift to openness and interoperability, Microsoft yesterday released an updated PHP driver for its flagship Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), SQL Server.
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Posted by David Ramel on 03/10/20150 comments
One day after Big Data player Pivotal Software Inc. changed its business model by open sourcing core technologies, Microsoft today announced related product updates with a definite open source slant.
The "new and enhanced" data services include an Azure HDInsight preview that runs on Linux, and the general availability of Storm on HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning, and Informatica technology on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
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Posted by David Ramel on 02/18/20150 comments
Microsoft announced a bevy of improvements to its cloud-based data products, including the Azure SQL Database Update V12 (preview), sporting new security features and bringing it closer to full SQL Server engine compatibility.
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Posted by David Ramel on 01/30/20150 comments
The software arm of Dell Inc. yesterday announced new versions of a bevy of products for the caretaking and development of SQL Server relational database management systems (RDBMSes).
Dell Software updated five different tools for monitoring, managing, protecting and boosting the performance of SQL Server databases, highlighted by version 11 of its Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise.
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Posted by David Ramel on 10/29/20140 comments
In Microsoft's new era of openness, interoperability and increased customer options, the company continues to hedge its Big Data bets with a stream of new partnerships, services and initiatives.
The company's continued expansion of data developer services in Microsoft Azure cloud was highlighted this week by a partnership with Cloudera Inc., one of the "big three" Big Data players with enterprise offerings based on Apache Hadoop.
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Posted by David Ramel on 10/23/20140 comments