Microsoft announces previews of Windows Azure HDInsight Service and HDInsight Server for Windows

Last week Microsoft announced a new preview of both the Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows.

HDInsight delivers Apache Hadoop compatibility, which is a open source platform and provides a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets (so called big data) across clusters of computers using simple programming models and is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.

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By hosting Hadoop on Windows Server and Azure, the platform can be accessed using Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Tools like Excel, PowerPivot for Excel and Power View and provides a solution for large unstructured data sets, where SQL server is Microsoft’s solution to access large structured data sets.