3 Things to Know About Azure SQL Data Warehouse Gen 2

Today in my series ‘3 Things to Know About Azure’, I’ll focus on Azure SQL Data Warehouse Gen 2. Azure SQL Data Warehouse is one of the original data platforms delivered on Azure.

The Gen 2 release provides significant updates. Here are 3 key things to know about the Gen 2 release:

1. Adaptive Caching – This is likely the most significant improvement in SQL Data Warehouse. With the release of Gen 2, Microsoft is striving to resolve a report performance issues common on the MVP platform. Prior to Gen 2, large queries performed well but repetitive queries to support reports and other interactive solutions was lacking.

Adaptive caching uses a combination of in-memory and disk deployed caches to retain common query requests to improve the overall performance of those queries. As well as improved overall performance, there’s also improved flexibility of the Azure Data Warehouse solution. Adaptive caching is one of the primary reasons to look at and move to the Gen 2 release.

2. Increased Concurrency Capability – The default level of 32 concurrent query slots has been an ongoing conversation in the SQL Data Warehouse, as well as in the appliance. Queries that use more than one slot or large volumes of queries will end up queuing. This queuing results in unexpected delays in fulfilling requests.

If you needed a high-level concurrency, you really couldn’t do anything. Today with Gen 2, you can. Now you can increase to 128 concurrent queries to support a heavier workload in your environment. This gives you the option to continue to grow your use case for Azure SQL DW and take advantage of the technology in your environment.

3. Increased Scaling Capabilities – This works in conjunction with increased concurrency capabilities. It’s now possible to scale well beyond the 6,000 Data Warehouse Units (DWUs) that you got. DWUs represents that combination of memory processing and storage access when you look at your performance and overall capabilities.

With compute optimize, you now have the option to scale up to 30,000 DWUs and this will likely increase over time. You can use SQL Data Warehouse for even your largest data warehouse solutions without an issue.

As you can see, Azure SQL Data Warehouse has had some exceptional updates with Gen 2 that better support larger workloads for your reporting and data warehousing needs. So, if you’re thinking about going to the cloud and wondering if you have the capacity to do so, Azure SQL DW Gen 2 brings the capacity and has increased the competition with many other tools.

If you’re reevaluating moving from an on-premise appliance such as Teradyne, OraFlex Data or even Microsoft’s APS, or if you have any other use cases you’d like to look at and need help with, Pragmatic Works can help you modernize your data warehouse solutions on Azure.

We’ve helped many of our customers to modernize their data warehouse - we can do it for you too. Click the link below or contact us—we’re here to help you with every step of your cloud journey.