Word of the Day: Microsoft Azure Data Lake

Word of the Day Daily updates on the latest technology terms |December 12, 2017

Microsoft Azure Data Lake Microsoft Azure Data Lake is a highly scalable public cloud service that allows developers, scientists, business professionals and other Microsoft customers to gain insight from large, complex data sets. As with most data lake offerings, the service is composed of two parts: data storage and data analytics. According to Microsoft, customers can provision Azure Data Lakes to store an unlimited amount of structured, semi-structured or unstructured data from a variety of sources. The service does not impose limits on account sizes, file sizes, or the amount of data that can be stored in a data lake.   On the analytics side, Azure Data Lake customers can write their own code to perform specific operational or transactional data transformation and analysis tasks. They can also use existing tools, such as Microsoft's Analytics Platform System or Azure Data Lake Analytics, to query data sets. Azure Data Lake is based on the Apache Hadoop YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator) cluster management platform and is intended to scale dynamically across SQL servers in Azure Data Lake, as well as servers in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. A unified approach within the Hadoop ecosystem helps the service accommodate the needs of big data projects, which are compute-intensive and often have distributed data sources. Pricing for Azure Data Lake is dependent upon numerous variables, including storage capacity, the number of analytics units (AUs) per minute, the number of completed jobs and the cost of managed Hadoop and Spark clusters. As of this writing, the Azure Data Lake Store service is priced at $0.039 per GB per month for pay as you go, with capacity-based discounts up to 33% for monthly commitments. The Azure Pricing Calculator can help customers determine exact data lake costs. Quote of the Day "Finding a balance between regulating the data lake and keeping it wide open for analytics uses is one of the most important considerations for a successful deployment." - Trea Lavery   Trending Terms Windows Azure data lake Apache Hadoop YARN semi-structured data archival storage SQL Azure   Learning Center Job searches reveal top skills for tech positions Tech positions today are calling for skills in JavaScript library React and cloud computing platforms, according to new research by jobs site Indeed. Quiz: What's your IQ on data lake implementation and management? Take this quiz to find out if you're ready for a data lake implementation at your company, and if you're prepared to get all of the analytics benefits one provides. Five quick links: Managing big data in the cloud Managing big data in the cloud can be as complex as the data itself, but new tools can help. Here are five quick links to get acquainted with big data and its relationship with cloud. Compare AWS vs. Azure vs. Google big data services Big data services for AWS vs. Azure vs. Google are hard to compare, but customers benefit from the competition. Choosing one or the other comes down to testing the waters. Azure Data Lake Analytics gets boost from U-SQL, a new SQL variant U-SQL is a dialect of T-SQL that takes a page out of the Hive playbook. It's meant to tame Azure Data Lake Analytics for SQL mortals. Writing for Business Although big data is getting bigger all the time, much of the data being collected ___ useless. a. is b. are Answer   Stay In Touch For feedback about any of our definitions or to suggest a new definition, please contact me at: mrouse@techtarget.com   Visit the Word of the Day Archives and catch up on what you've missed!   FOLLOW US About This E-Newsletter This e-newsletter is published by the TechTarget network. To unsubscribe from Whatis.com, click here. Please note, this will not affect any other subscriptions you have signed up for. TechTarget, Whatis, 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466. Contact: webmaster@techtarget.com Copyright 2016 TechTarget. All rights reserved.