Microsoft details Azure Data Lake plans, says public preview is coming later this year
Microsoft fleshes out its Azure Data Lake plans; readies public preview — Microsoft plans to make its Azure Data Lake store, analytics service and new query language — all derivatives …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after the public preview of Azure Data Catalog, its enterprise metadata repository, Microsoft is filling out the rest of its managed data stack: Azure Data Lake now has named components — a store, an analytics service and a purpose-built query language, all derivatives of existing technology — with a public preview promised before year-end.
The move matters because it puts Microsoft's answer on record at a moment when enterprises were still deciding between self-managed big-data clusters and cloud-native stores, and because the pieces announced here foreshadow the platform Microsoft later consolidated under Azure Purview's automated discovery and tracking.
First-order effects
- Enterprise data teams gain a concrete candidate to evaluate this year: a single lake store plus analytics service and new query language they can pilot instead of standing up their own Hadoop-style infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- The end of support for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 pushes legacy database customers toward Azure anyway, giving Microsoft a ready-made audience to migrate into the new lake and analytics services rather than onto rival clouds.
Third-order effects
- If the component-by-component rollout holds — Catalog in 2015, Lake in 2015, Information Protection rights management the next summer — the endpoint visible in Purview is a data platform where storage, cataloging, protection and governance are bought as one automated service, not assembled from separate tools.
The trend: Cloud vendors are absorbing the enterprise data stack piece by piece, until storage, query, security and governance collapse into a single managed platform governed by policy rather than tooling choices.