Preview of the Windows Azure HDInsight Service -- our cloud-based distribution of Hadoop – is broadly available through the Windows Azure Portal. The Windows Azure HDInsight Service is built on the Hortonworks Data Platform to ensure long term compatibility with Apache Hadoop , while providing customers...

I recently attended internal training on Microsoft Big Data presented by our partner in this space Horton Works. It was a bit of a learning curve as the world of Big Data is a paradigm shift to the relational world, or so I thought. It turns out it isn't that remarkably different. The Horton Works guys...

With the launch of the Virtual Machine preview on Windows Azure along with Media Services and Websites I have been busy just setting up a few environments. It has been really easy to spin up new VMs very quickly – literally in few clicks once you have registered for the preview for Virtual Machine. What...

If you really have a requirement for scaling out your database workload today then an option that is available to you is the public cloud with SQL Azure. This enables you to future proof your architecture and manage the scale without the complexity and overhead of managing the infrastructure. You can...

I have recently had the opportunity to present on the topic of BigData at several forums including the DW 2.0 Asia-Pac Summit and at the Microsoft Big Picture event. At both these events there were sceptics of BigData and as such I thought I might write this blog post. I must agree partly though with...