Currently in preview, Microsoft refers to its Azure SQL Data Warehouse as a fully managed, elastic and petabyte-scale columnar data warehouse service that’s compatible and integrated with the Microsoft SQL Server ecosystem. It provides an enterprise with a distributed database management system that can store and process large volumes of relational and nonrelational data.
The SQL Data Warehouse service enables customers to elastically pause their usage or shut down their compute infrastructure, while maintaining the data. During a pause, the data is maintained, but can’t be accessed. Customers pay for only the commodity storage used to persist the data, potentially reducing the cost of their enterprise data warehouse.
