Microsoft today announced Apache Storm technology for real-time Big Data analytics will be integrated with Microsoft Azure, highlighting several expansions of the company's cloud computing platform.
"We're announcing support of real-time analytics for Apache Hadoop in Azure HDInsight and new machine learning capabilities in the Azure Marketplace," said Microsoft exec T.K. Rengarajan in a blog post. "Our partner and Hadoop vendor Hortonworks also announced how they are integrating with Microsoft Azure with the latest release of the Hortonworks Data Platform." Hortonworks Inc., curator of one of the leading Big Data enterprise software distributions, teamed up with Microsoft to develop the HDInsight Hadoop-based service in the Azure cloud.
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Posted by David Ramel on 10/15/20140 comments
The Espresso Logic Backend as a Service (BaaS) that can "join" SQL and NoSQL database calls now integrates with Microsoft Azure, the company announced yesterday.
The tool, which lets developers span multiple data sources with one RESTful API call via a point-and-click interface, now works with SQL Server, MongoDB and other services available on the Microsoft cloud.
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Posted by David Ramel on 09/18/20140 comments
Windows Phone developers have spoken and Microsoft has listened: Mobile app builders can now respond to reviews of their wares posted in the store.
After a pilot program that started in April, the functionality is being rolled out to "all eligible Windows Phone developers," said Bernardo Zamora in a blog post yesterday, though it wasn't clear what makes a developer eligible.
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Posted by David Ramel on 08/13/20140 comments
Microsoft yesterday unveiled an updated SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) to ease moving existing Oracle databases to SQL Server 2014.
It's the latest back-and-forth effort between the two companies to help users of competitors' RDBMS products switch to each company's own offering.
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Posted by David Ramel on 07/25/20140 comments
The latest addition to the Microsoft Azure cloud offerings is a new manifestation of the NoSQL database MongoDB service.
The Microsoft Azure Store now offers a fully managed, highly available, MongoDB-as-a-Service add-on.
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Posted by David Ramel on 06/26/20140 comments
Recent research sponsored by Database as a Service (DBaaS) company Tesora shows SQL databases are holding their own in cloud usage.
The start-up, which is developing a DBaaS product for the open source Trove DBaaS project introduced in the April "Icehouse" release of the open source OpenStack cloud platform, today released a report titled ""Database Usage in the Public and Private Cloud: Choices and Preferences." More than 500 developers in North American open source developer communities responded, providing insights into database usage in public and private clouds.
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Posted by David Ramel on 06/18/20140 comments
The owner of "the most complete NoSQL database" is targeting the Microsoft .NET Framework for a new open source release. Sound strange? Welcome to the new world of cross-platform interoperability. Developers write their code once and -- with some automatic optimization -- it will run on anything, anywhere, even leveraging native device functionality.
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Posted by David Ramel on 05/22/20140 comments
MongoDB just won't go away. Two weeks after a major update to the popular NoSQL database, Microsoft announced new high-memory instances were available on its Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
The cloud-served MongoDB instances come from MongoLab, a fully managed database service provider that works with major cloud platforms such as those provided by Amazon and Google. The service has been available on Microsoft Azure since October 2012, but with some limitations.
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Posted by David Ramel on 04/23/20140 comments
Developers today learned more about the recently released MongoDB version 2.6 when parent company MongoDB Inc. conducted a webinar to explain its new features.
Last week the company announced the "biggest release ever" of its popular NoSQL database, with improvements coming in the areas of aggregation, text-search integration, query engine performance, security and many more.
"With comprehensive core server enhancements, a groundbreaking new automation tool, and critical enterprise features, MongoDB 2.6 is by far our biggest release ever," said Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder.
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Posted by David Ramel on 04/17/20140 comments
Developers today were still weighing in on a recent Microsoft decision to switch directions on OData support to focus on ASP.NET Web API instead of WCF Data Services, angering many who had invested much work into the latter.
OK, this is somewhat involved, but I think it deserves a close look because it touches on so many issues developers have with Microsoft's support of new products and technologies and changes in direction. In this case, data devs in particular.
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Posted by David Ramel on 04/02/20140 comments
Microsoft last week released a minor version update of its popular Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tool with numerous bug fixes and new features, including the ability to reverse engineer an existing database to create a Code First model.
Entity Framework (EF) 6.1 is the first ".x" update since Microsoft open sourced the tool moving to version 6 and moved it to CodePlex. It features tooling consolidation that "extends the ADO.NET Entity Data Model wizard to support creating Code First models, including reverse engineering from an existing database," Microsoft's Rowan Miller explained in an ADO.NET Blog post.
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Posted by David Ramel on 03/25/20140 comments
I like tinkering around with OData. And since a certain industry giant has been pushing open JavaScript development over its own vastly superior technologies, I've been trying to wrap my mind around that language using my old friend OData. The jQuery getJSON function helps working with OData, but it's still JavaScript.
(Don't get me started on JavaScript. Actually, I am started, so send me your reasons for hating the language and I'll put them in a future "10 Reasons to Hate JavaScript" post. Should be easy enough.)
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Posted by David Ramel on 03/21/20140 comments