Our goal when we launched Azure SQL Data Warehouse was to create a SQL-based, fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse that would serve as the platform for analytics at massive scale. By separating compute from the storage customers have been empowered to also create highly elastic solutions. Elastic scale enables customers to provision in minutes, scale in seconds and pause or resume the service on demand affording complete control of compute consumption.

Today we are making an exciting announcement. Azure SQL Data Warehouse is increasing its compute scale threefold, raising the compute scale from 6,000 to 18,000 Data Warehouse Units (DWU) so that customers can run their most compute intensive data warehouse workloads in the cloud.

Companies including Toshiba, MediaBrix and Integral Analytics have all embraced the separation of compute and storage pioneered by Azure SQL Data Warehouse to deliver simple, highly elastic and scalable analytical solutions in the cloud.

It is now almost twelve months to the day since Azure SQL Data Warehouse has been available in Azure. What an incredible year it has been! The service is in thirty regions worldwide, making it the most broadly available cloud data warehouse in the world with almost twice the regional coverage of any other cloud data warehouse service; empowering companies to drive new analytical insights from their data wherever and whenever they need to do so.

With this preview, customers can scale their data warehouse workloads in Azure to new heights; driving answers to the most demanding analytical questions using our fully featured, enterprise class, SQL engine. Unlimited columnar storage is also important, as the diversity, variety and volume of customer data continues to grow at exponential rates. With PolyBase automatically scaling with the system, no additional work is required to take advantage of all the additional computing horsepower that is now available. These features make it even easier for customers to curate and serve the vast quantities of data being amassed in their cloud infrastructure with Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

As with all our compute performance levels, these new scale options also come with the flexibility that Azure SQL Data Warehouse provides by default; securely separating compute and storage, elastically managing compute with pause & resume and providing full enterprise integration giving you the audit and compliance requirements you need at every level of scale. Whether you require federated authentication, transparent data encryption, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 1, SOC 2 or SOC 3 compliance Azure SQL Data Warehouse has you covered.

In the last year, we have also been actively engaging with many of our customers. Their feedback has helped to shape our improvements and this service update. Our customers have advocated for even greater compute power and agility from Azure SQL Data Warehouse. We see this inside Microsoft as well. Customers aren’t just wondering about petabyte scale. They are living in the petabyte world and thinking about solutions many times larger than that. Our customers, especially those at DW3000 and DW6000, have therefore been keen to know what is next in terms of compute and storage scale from the service.

“Our mission is to become the world’s No.1 online fashion destination for 20-somethings,” said Bob Strudwick, Chief Technology Officer of ASOS.com. “The scalability and performance provided by Azure SQL Data Warehouse supports our enterprise analytics platform and drives new insights for ASOS right across the business, helping us to deliver the best customer experience we can.”

Later this month, customers will be able to provision new preview instances of Azure SQL Data Warehouse at DW9000 and DW18000 through the Azure portal. Users will be able to scale with more compute capacity than ever before to drive their analytical workloads using our fully featured SQL engine. With unlimited columnar storage, customers will be free to use these new high scale performance levels to analyze unbounded volumes of data.

This is an exciting milestone in our vision for Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The customer success we have witnessed in one year has been incredibly energizing for the team. As we move into year two, we will continue to execute on our vision for Azure SQL Data Warehouse: building the largest and fastest cloud data warehouse in the world.

I encourage you to start using Azure SQL Data Warehouse. You can also sign up for the preview directly in the Azure portal. We look forward to welcoming you onto the service.