Data professionals

Scaling out read workloads in Azure Database for MySQL; Secure server access with VNet service endpoints for Azure Database for MariaDB; Announcing new capabilities in Azure Firewall; and much more.

With the latest release of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft doubles-down on Azure SQL DW as one of the core data services for digital transformation on Azure.

We are happy to announce that Microsoft and Intel are partnering to bring optimized deep learning frameworks to Azure. These optimizations are available in a new offering on the Azure marketplace called the Intel Optimized Data Science VM for Linux (Ubuntu).

Azure Databricks provides a fast, easy, and collaborative Apache Spark™-based analytics platform to accelerate and simplify the process of building big data and AI solutions backed by industry leading SLAs.

Data Integration is complex with many moving parts. It helps organizations to combine data and complex business processes in hybrid data environments. Failures are very common in data integration workflows.

Today we are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Premium Blob Storage. Premium Block Blob is a new performance tier in Azure Blob Storage, complimenting the existing Hot, Cool, and Archive tiers.

For read-heavy workloads that you are looking to scale out, you can use read replicas, which are now generally available to all Azure Database for MySQL users.

Ensure security and limit access to your MariaDB server with the virtual network (VNet) service endpoints now generally available for Azure Database for MariaDB.

Developers can now access the latest Cognitive Services Speech SDK which now supports: Selection of the input microphone through the AudioConfig class, Unity in C# (beta), and additional sample code. Read the updated Speech Services documentation to get started today.

There are numerous IoT use cases in different industries. The most common categories of IoT use cases include predictive maintenance, connected vehicles, anomaly detection, asset monitoring, and many others.

You can now extract more insights and unlock new workflows from your images with the latest enhancements to Cognitive Services’ Computer Vision service.

We recently announced Cognitive Services running in Docker containers with an initial set of containers ranging from Computer Vision, Face, Text Analytics, and Language Understanding.