Analytics in Azure remains unmatched with new innovations

Digital disruption has created unlimited potential for companies to embrace data as a competitive advantage for their business. As a result, analytics continues to be a key priority for enterprises.

When it comes to analytics, customers tell us that they need a solution that provides them with the best price, performance, security, and privacy, as well as a system that can easily deliver powerful insights across the organization. Azure has them covered. Analytics in Azure provides unparalleled performance at incredible value, not only in one, but two independent benchmark reports. Additionally, as illustrated by Donald Farmer, a well-respected thought leader in the analytics space, analytics in Azure has the most advanced security and privacy features in the market. And without limitations on concurrency, employees can get their insights in seconds from all their enterprise data, through beautiful Power BI visualizations. Analytics in Azure makes insights accessible to everyone in your organization.

Innovations in analytics

Azure Data Factory is a hybrid data integration service for developing scalable extract/transform/load and extract/load/transform (ETL/ELT) data pipelines. With Data Factory, cloud-scale data integration can now be done through an intuitive visual environment and with no code. Data Factory makes ETL/ELT more efficient for developers, and more accessible for data scientists and data analysts, bringing data sources and data types together for simpler and faster insights.

Azure Data Factory now features visual data transformation with Mapping Data Flows, available in preview. With a few clicks, users can focus on building their data models rather than writing and maintaining code. Mapping Data Flows is powered by Azure Databricks and provides the same processing power and scale as the code-based approach directly in Azure Databricks. Azure Data Factory supports Python, .NET, and ARM for those developers that prefer to code.

It’s exciting to see partners, like Pragmatic Works, already benefiting from this new innovation.

Our goal is to empower customers who have long standing investments in SSIS to leverage the cloud. Data Factory makes it easy to move existing SSIS ETL to the cloud without any redevelopment, saving substantial time and money. Only Azure offers this truly hybrid capability.

A new capability called Wrangling Data Flows, available in preview, gives users the ability to explore and wrangle data at scale. Wrangling Data Flows empowers users to visually discover and explore their data without writing a single line of code.

We are also excited to announce today support for semi-structured data in Azure SQL Data Warehouse, available in preview. Now with one service, both structured and semi-structured data formats (like JSON) can now be analyzed directly from the data warehouse for faster insights.

We remain focused on increasing SQL Data Warehouse’s industry-leading speed and performance and are announcing two new features available in preview that further enable this vision.

Result-set Caching enables queries that have been previously ran to be immediately available to subsequent users thus reducing any lags in reports. Materialized Views allows SQL Data Warehouse to automatically rewrite user queries to leverage deployed query results, leading to significantly improved query performance.

Read More: 70-778: Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power BI

And for organizations with complex requirements and multiple users accessing the same data warehouse, we are pleased to announce the general availability of Workload Importance. This feature will give users the capability to decide which workloads need to be executed first to ensure their most important queries are properly prioritized.