The Big Reason You Should Think About Azure SQL DW

There are many reasons why your company should strongly consider using Azure SQL DW. However, the point of this post to convince you - the developer, consultant, architect, and/or accidental-DBA - that you should
start getting familiar with Azure SQL DW for one simple and hefty reason — Big Data.

Among other things, Big Data typically relates to a growth in volume, velocity, and variety in data. Likely, your workplace is facing challenges with (a) an increased appetite to acquire more data and make sense of it, (b) processing current and future data more quickly to influence more business decisions, and (c) handling different data structures and formats. For more on big data, refer to these definitions by Wikipedia, and MIT Technology Review .  

With Azure SQL DW, you can ingest more data and process it more quickly due to its massive parallel processing architecture, as well as the ability scale in both processing power (on demand) and up to 240 TB of storage compressed. Additionally, with Polybase, you can ingest non-SQL data.

Azure SQL DW is Big Data ready, and when compared to all other MS SQL platforms (i.e., on premise SQL Server, SQL Server on Azure VM, and Azure SQL Database), it is by far the most powerful implementation. There is not a more robust platform for using T-SQL. In other words, for now this is the end of the line. Additionally, Azure SQL DW allows you to do more with Big Data without having to learn another language. In today's world of ever-growing data and platforms, that's pretty valuable.  

While you assess the importance of learning or increasing your skills in other languages, you can code in T-SQL with SQL Server Management Studio like you normally do. This time, you'll have the massive parallel processing (MPP) architecture with 60 databases churning your queries all under the hood, and you won't need to intensively manage the cluster as you might in other cluster computing implementations. Get more out of your Big Data with Azure SQL DW, where you can code T-SQL with more power but not more distractions.