Microsoft big data offering called HDinsight, announced at the end of 2011 and publicly previewed in October 2012, is now general available.
Windows Azure HDInsight as the service is called enables customers to use Apache Hadoop without having to invest in own infrastructure and time to setup the software.
Hadoop is one of the most popular open-source tools to analyse lots of unstructured data from several sources. Big Data, or data mining, is used by many organizations to predict for example behaviour and respond to that.
Netflix, the US company who offers movies and tv-series online analyses the actions and choices of customers to better predict what kind of movies the customer likes. If the system is so intelligent to know the taste of the customer, chances are high the customer will order that suggested movie.
The NSA is a big users of Hadoop. They probably will use the meta data of telephone calls to see what patterns are suspicious.
Said so is simple to understand this long-standing partnership between Microsoft and Hortonworks, Hadoop holds the scepter for dramatically lowered the cost of storing and analyzing huge quantities of unstructured data giving the opportunity for companies to try and then invest in Big Data, sometimes at the expense of legacy data infrastructure companies like Oracle.
Windows Azure HDInsight features full compatibility with Apache Hadoop and supports the integration with SQL Server, PowerBI and other BI tools from Microsoft.
On the other side Microsoft dropped the develop of its on premises incarnation formerly known as HDInsight Server for Windows.
Our vision is how do we bring big data to a billion people, we want to make the data and insights accessible to everyone.
said Eron Kelly, Microsoft’s SQL Server General Manager.