SQL Server 2016 Can Work in Tandem with Hadoop
According to more and more people, Microsoft may have finally, truly warmed up to Linux and open source. CEO Satya Nadella (shown) has been much in the news for his comments on how he "loves Linux" and he has noted that much of the Azure cloud platform is Linux-based. Microsoft's newfound open source interests are also extending in the direction of SQL Server. The company has announced that SQL Server will work compatibly with Linux.
And now, as the company is announcing SQL Server 16, you can now use SQL queries with Hadoop and Azure cloud storage.
SQL Server 2016 is now generally available following a preview release program last year. Most notably, the database platform also provides tools for cross-platform analytics such as Polybase, letting users run queries on external data kept in Hadoop or Azure binary large object (BLOB) storage.
"As with linked servers, PolyBase attempts to offload as much of the processing as it can onto the source database. Then means that when executing a query against Hadoop or Azure blob storage, it will generate the appropriate map/reduce operations. This is known as a “pushdown” and it has limitations that the developer needs to be aware of."
Still, being able to aim queries at Hadoop may be attractive to many SQL Server users. Essentially, many users will be able to explore leveraging relational and non-relational data analytics in tandem.
SQL Server 2016 also features a lot of performance enhancements, as noted here, and you can find out about compatibility with Linux here.