The Snowflake Computing data warehouse-as-a-service gets to a new cloud-- following launch on AWS, a partnership with Microsoft brings the service to the Azure cloud in preview form before a Q3 2018 launch.
"Migration of an enterprise data warehouse into the cloud is a key requirement for Azure customers," Microsoft says. "We look forward to partnering with Snowflake to enable these data warehouse migrations for enterprise customers."
Founded in 2012, Snowflake Computing says it has the only data warehouse built for the cloud. It promises to sidestep the main issues involved with data warehouses, namely cost, complexity and inflexibility. It uses a new SQL data warehouse dubbed a "complete relational database" with an architecture compatible with Oracle, Teradata, Netezza, SQL Server and Vertica, and support for both structure and machine generated semi-structured data (JSON, XML, AVRO).
The service provides access to an "architecturally unlimited" number of concurrent users and applications, with direct, governed and secure data sharing in real time. Thus enterprises can easily fore one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many data sharing relationships.