We’re excited to announce the monthly release of SQL Server 2019 community technology preview (CTP) 3.2.

With this release of SQL Server 2019 community technology preview 3.2, we are announcing the preview of Big Data Clusters for SQL Server 2019. Big Data Clusters for SQL Server enables big data analytics within SQL Server. It brings HDFS and Apache Spark™ into SQL Server for scale out compute and storage.

Big data clusters allow you to deploy scalable clusters of SQL Server, Apache Spark™, and HDFS running on Kubernetes. It provides all the tools and systems to ingest, store, and prepare data for analysis as well as to train and operationalize machine learning models. It allows you to query external data sources through data virtualization and combine and analyze your high-value relational data with high-volume big data. You will be also be able to build and deploy scalable and productive data-driven applications in big data clusters.

Our early adopter customers are already using Big Data Clusters for SQL Server 2019 for their production workloads. Check out what they have to say below:

Systems Imagination Inc.

“With SQL Server 2019 big data clusters, we can solve for on-demand big data experiments. We can analyze cancer research data coming from dozens of different data sources, mine interesting graph features, and carry out analysis at scale.” – Pieter Derdeyn, Knowledge Engineer, Systems Imagination Inc

Aginity

“We are excited to see Microsoft up the game in modern databases with the richest feature set we have seen to date. With SQL Server 2019 big data clusters’ management and performance architecture, our customers will have the ability to scale analytics across our portfolio of analytic management solutions, Aginity Pro Team, and Enterprise and build a trusted analytic layer to operationalize analytics in a highly consistent and efficient way both on-premises and in the cloud.”- Paul Schaut, CEO, Aginity

There are several scenarios in which big data clusters lets you interact with your big data. Please visit the SQL Server big data clusters documentation to learn more.

To download the preview bits for Big Data Clusters for SQL Server 2019, please review the documentation to learn more.

In addition to the preview of Big Data Clusters for SQL Server 2019, we are pleased to announce the integration of Azul System’s Zulu Embedded for all scenarios where Java is used in SQL Server – in PolyBase, Apache Spark™, Java extensibility, and more. There is no additional cost beyond what you pay for SQL Server.

Customers are encouraged to deploy this free preview, try out features in this release, and provide feedback to the engineering team. Your feedback is very helpful in refining features to be the most useful.

Check out the What’s new in SQL Server 2019 preview documentation to learn more.

Ready to learn more?