14 DAY TRIAL // This week, Microsoft made available for download the final flavor of SQL Server 2012, which was accompanied by a second Preview of their Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure.
Last year, the company announced plans to come up with Hadoop-based distributions for customers using Windows Server and Windows Azure to expand the available business intelligence (BI) capabilities.
Following the release of a preview of Hadoop for Windows Azure in early March, when the RTM version of SQL Server was made available for download, the Redmond-based giant delivered a new flavor of the service, to improve its capacity and features.
According to Microsoft, the Hadoop service’s capacity has been expanded by up to four times, which should enable it to meet high demand.
“This preview provides an elastic Hadoop service with more reliability through disaster recovery of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) NameNode, and support for advanced analytics through Hadoop projects like Mahout,” the company announced.
At the same time, the software giant notes that the new service preview delivers “actionable insights to everyone through familiar tools like Office, SharePoint and award winning BI tools like PowerPivot and Power View in SQL Server 2012.”
Through the new preview, customers will be able to enrich their data connecting to data and intelligence outside their firewalls.
For those out of the loop, we should note that the Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that enables the distributed processing of large data sets using a simple programming model.
“It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage,” Microsoft explains.
“Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library detects and handles failures at the application layer. This results in a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.”
Those who are interested in signing up for the newest preview of Hadoop for Windows Azure should head over to this page on Microsoft’s website.