Microsoft introduces deeper data product integrations

. Microsoft today unveiled what it refers to as its “Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform” at its Build developer conference. That’s not really a new platform at all; rather, it’s an effort to connect the company’s existing database, analytics, and governance services.

I was informed by Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Azure Data, that the transition toward this platform strategy began a few years ago. He stated, “I saw that in analytics four years ago.” “We saw where we had Power BI, data warehousing, big data analytics, and data integration as a separate service. The most common problem we saw from customers was putting them together. “Oh, I have to combine the data, move it into the lake, run some warehousing queries, display it on a dashboard in Power BI, and maybe do a machine learning workflow,” The first step in this direction was taken by the company with Azure Synapse, which assisted customers in working with various types of data across various services, primarily with a focus on data lakes and warehouses. Kumar pointed out that the business is now extending this to operational databases and governance. This specifically indicates that Microsoft is now launching Azure Synapse Link for SQL, which, when used in conjunction with Azure Synapse Analytics, enables real-time analytics for Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2022. As for SQL Server 2022, which is now in preview, Kumar described it as the “most cloud-connected release yet,” with support for Synapse Link so that all new commits will be sent to Synapse and Azure for analysis, all without impacting the performance of the transactional workloads. Microsoft Purview, the company’s data governance platform, now integrates with SQL Server 2022. Additionally, disaster recovery to Azure AQL Managed Instance in the cloud was made possible by SQL Server 2022 connected to Azure. Kumar mentioned that Purview, which is already able to manage a number of third-party assets on-premises, has new capabilities, such as the ability to gain deeper insights into a company’s entire data estate (and Microsoft is collaborating with third-party service providers to expand these capabilities as well), in addition to the integration with SQL Server. “One of the big questions we hear from our customers is, ‘look, our data estate is spread across multiple regions of the world but we don’t want our European data to ever leave the boundaries of Europe, so we need to have those insights, we need to have alerts if that rule is ever broken.’” With the new Data Insights feature, enterprises will now be able to do just that.
Naturally, there are also a few new product features that have nothing to do with the platform as a whole. For instance, the new Microsoft Graph Data Connect will enable “customers to securely export their Microsoft 365 data estate,” although I’m not sure that anyone really knows what the Microsoft Graph is all about these days. Additionally, there is a new “Business Critical” tier for Azure Database for MySQL that promises performance improvements of 1.5 times. Perhaps more importantly, analysts will be able to create these data marts within Power BI thanks to a preview of a self-service feature for the datamart. According to Kumar’s explanation, “today, if you’re a business user and you want a data mart, your normal course of action is to go talk to IT.” “Now, with Power BI datamarts, we’ve made that into a self-service capability within Power BI so you can select the data and there is an entire workflow that makes it very easy, while ensuring that all the governance pieces around data governance and security are respected,” the author states. “You can select the data and there is a workflow that makes it very easy.”