There are a lot of ways to build a database in the cloud. Picking the correct solution for your workload can be a daunting task. When building a data warehouse solution that needs to scale out from terabytes to near petabyte scale, you suddenly have a lot fewer options. The two biggest players in the cloud market are Amazon’s Red Shift product, and Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW).

There two solutions are going to take a very different approach to building and designing your solution, and migrating between the two solutions can be tricky as there is a lot of data movement that needs to happen to move your data warehouse.

Azure SQL DW has some distinct advantages over Red Shift.

Scaling

One of the biggest is its ability to scale up and down as needed within minutes with just a small service disconnection. Scaling a Red Shift environment up and down requires large amounts of downtime, the bigger the data warehouse, the more downtime is required as data must be moved around within the Red Shift environment for the data warehouse to be scaled up and down. So if you want to start small, and as the data warehouse grows, scale up you really can’t without a large interruption of service to your users. With SQL DW, the scale up or down operation is kicked off, and within a few minutes more (or less, depending on your need) computer resources are available behind the SQL DW database.

Tools

Another huge advantage with SQL DW is that as far as most tools are concerned, it’s just a SQLServer Database. Basically, anything that supports T-SQL can connect to the SQL DW database in Azure and run queries against it. The experience is much better if you use a new version of SQL Server management studio, but it isn’t required. There’s some abstraction that happens on the server side so take the queries which are run, which are written as normal T-SQL statements, to parallelize them against all the backed computer resources to give you the compute scale out that you need with the SQL DW platform. This makes migrating from a SQL Server data warehouse on-premises very easy because the reports which you run today, can just be pointed to use the SQL DW with no changes to the reports. If you are moving from an Oracle Data Warehouse to SQL DW, odds are the reports will be able to run with little to no change, as most SELECT statements convert from Oracle to SQL Server syntax very easily.

From a data visualization and tools layer the entire SQL Server stack just works with SQL DW. Running SSAS on premises or in the cloud–no problem. Power BI can execute live reports against your SQL DW.

Authentication

Additionally, SQL DW supports Azure Active Directory authentication, which means your users can login with their on-premises credentials. If you have Active Directory Federation Services configured, your users can have pass through authentication.

Pausing

With SQL DW if there are times of the day or night where you know that there are no users running queries or data loads against the data warehouse we can simply pause the SQL DW so that we aren’t paying for compute resources when we aren’t using them. This can make it more cost effective to run a large sized SQL DW so that processing can be completed faster, then the data warehouse paused during non-work hours.

Our Success

These are just a few of the reasons that we’ve been using Azure SQL DW with our clients. We’ve had great success with data warehouse projects which have been using Azure SQL DW and we hope to have many more of them. If you’d like to work with our team, we’d be happy to assist with your Azure SQL DW projects. Contact the DCAC team to get started with your Azure SQL DW project today.

Denny

The post Azure SQL DW or Amazon Red Shift? appeared first on SQL Server with Mr. Denny.