Today is the first day of Microsoft's Ignite 2018 conference in Orlando, and it announced SQL Server 2019, a public preview of which will be available today. The promise of the new database management system (DBMS) is that businesses will be able to manage their relational and their non-relational databases in one offering.
Microsoft says that it improved PolyBase so that it has connectors to more data sources, including "Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Cosmos DB, Mongo DB, Oracle, and Teradata". Users will now be able to use T-SQL to query all of their databases, so you won't be locked into separate data silos; in other words, all of your databases can talk to each other. It also has big data baked in with support for Spark and Hadoop.
SQL Server 2019 can, unsurprisingly, run on-prem, on Azure Stack, or in the cloud. Users will have access to SQL Server Machine Learning Services and Spark Machine Learning, so they'll get insights on all of their data, again, regardless of what form that data comes in.
Microsoft today also announced Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, which will allow users to bring their SQL Server database to the cloud with no code changes at all. The firm promises that it has the full feature set of SQL Server, which is an impressive promise. By using the service to move to Azure, Microsoft says that businesses can save up to 80% over using competitors.
But of course, this is Ignite, so that's not all for data news. Microsoft announced a preview for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, which is a "highly scalable service tier" that lets you grow a database up to 100TB. Azure Database for MariaDB is in preview now as well, bringing support for the open-source database to Microsoft's cloud offerings.
And while it wouldn't be Ignite without database news, it wouldn't be database news without Cosmos DB news. Multi-master at global scale is generally available now, enabling "unprecedented write scalability and availability". Microsoft also announced the Cassandra API is generally available.
“Cosmos DB has delivered a high performance, worldwide platform for our global reputation system. With a click of a button we can rapidly deploy regions worldwide to deliver excellent response time to our customers and partners. The Cosmos DB Cassandra API eliminated major engineering efforts during the migration of our services as we were able to integrate with very minimal changes. Our largest service is slated to migrate with the launch of Cassandra API support.” Michael Shavell, Technical Director / Architect at Symantec.
Finally, Microsoft announced the preview for Azure Data Explorer, which is designed for "lightning fast" data exploration. You can use it to find insights about "petabytes of structured and unstructured data".
Indeed, there's been a ton of data news from Ignite so far, and it's just the first day.
