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 have not had the opportunity to blog in the last month and this has partly been due to a busy work schedule, however the greater reason was a technological one. This of course was the release of the Surface . I had pre-ordered mine and it was always my intent to use it as my main machine, which I have...

Big Data and BI working together Date/Time : Wednesday, November 14, 2012, 6:30 PM Location : The City Hotel, Sydney Big Data & Traditional BI solutions working together to enhance insights Big Data approaches allow us to solve some traditionally difficult problems – but traditional BI has been solving...

Public previews of Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows, Microsoft’s Apache Hadoop-based solutions for Windows Azure and Windows Server. For more information and access to the previews go to - http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/business...

Klout ( www.klout.com ) measures influence across the social web by analyzing social network user data. Klout uses the impact of opinions, links, and recommendations to identify influential individuals. Every day Klout scans 15 social networks, scores hundreds of millions of profiles, and processes over...

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...

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...