We are excited to share that Azure SQL Data Warehouse has introduced updates to the Azure portal and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to provide a seamless experience when loading, monitoring, and developing your SQL Data Warehouse. The updates include integrated support for loading from 20+ data stores on premise and in the cloud, a simple process to troubleshoot common issues, and highly requested functionality within SSMS.

SQL Data Warehouse is your go-to SQL based view across data, offering a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud solution. It is highly elastic, enabling you to provision and scale up to 60 times larger in seconds. You can scale compute and storage independently, allowing you to range from burst to archival scenarios, and pay based off what you're using instead of being locked into a confined bundle.

Azure Portal

Quick Load

You can now quickly integrate your SQL Data Warehouse with Azure Data Factory (ADF) with the new task panel which consists of common commands to execute against your data warehouse.

Azure Data Factory is a fully managed cloud-based data integration service which can be used to populate a SQL Data Warehouse with data from your existing system. It saves you valuable time enabling you to focus on evaluating and building solutions and deriving faster insights. Here are the key benefits of loading data using Azure Data Factory with SQL Data Warehouse:

• Rich data store support: built-in support for 20+ data stores on-premises and in the cloud.
• Easy to set up: intuitive wizard with no scripting required.
• Secure and compliant: data is transferred over HTTPS or ExpressRoute and the global service presence ensures your data never leaves the geographical boundary.
• Unparalleled performance by using PolyBase: using PolyBase is the most efficient way to move data into Azure SQL Data Warehouse. To load from Azure Blob Storage, ADF uses PolyBase directly. To load from data stores other than Azure Blob Storage, ADF uses the staging blob feature to convert your source data into PolyBase compatible format, and then use PolyBase to load into SQL DW.

Troubleshooting

You can simply troubleshoot issues related to your SQL Data Warehouse with the new version of the troubleshoot blade. This provides instructions on how to self diagnose your SQL Data Warehouse for common issues.

Monitoring

In the query drill-down blade, you can now conveniently view the number of concurrency slots that your queries are consuming along with its resource class. This enables you to manage your workload.

SQL Server Management Studio

We have addressed issues across SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) allowing you to:

• Execute the Generate Scripts wizard for database users and user defined functions
• View your logical server name within the table properties of your database
• Drop your database simply through the Object Explorer
• Leverage templates for stored procedures and scalar-valued functions

Learn More

Create a data warehouse today or check out the many resources for learning more about SQL Data Warehouse, including:

• What is Azure SQL Data Warehouse?
• SQL Data Warehouse best practices
• Video library
• MSDN forum
• CAT team blogs
• Stack Overflow forum