Microsoft Azure: Database and Analytics Services

As part of the Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative I am looking into different topics in Azure and summarize my learnings. This post is about Azure Database and Analytics Services

Azure database and analytics services

Azure offers the following services:

• Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service for schema-less data, which can be scaled for throughput and storage independently
• Azure SQL Database is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) database engine that handles most of the database management functions such as upgrading, patching, backups, and monitoring without user involvement
• Azure database for MySQL offers MySQL Community Edition database engine, versions 5.6, 5.7, and 8.0 as a service with high availability, scale as needed in seconds, security and automatic backups
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL offers PostgreSQL as a service with high availability, scale as needed in seconds, security and automatic backups. Azure also provides Hyperscale (Citus) option, to horizontally scale queries across multiple machines by using sharding.
• Azure SQL Managed Instance offers many of the same features as Azure SQL Database, however, Azure SQL Managed Instance provides some additional features like non-standard collations or cross database transactions

AS for big data and analytics there are some additional services

• Azure Synapse Analytics is an enterprise analytics service for big data and warehouses. It brings together the best of SQL technologies used in enterprise data warehousing, Spark technologies used for big data, Pipelines for data integration and ETL/ELT, and deep integration with other Azure services such as Power BI, CosmosDB, and AzureML.
• Azure HDInsight is a fully managed, open-source analytics service for enterprises (cloud distribution of Hadoop components) which can use frameworks like Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache HBase, Apache Hive, LLAP, Apache Kafka, Apache Storm and Azure Machine Learning
• Azure Databricks offers big data analytics and AI with optimized Apache Spark
• Azure Data Lake Analytics is an on-demand analytics job service that simplifies big data. Instead of deploying, configuring, and tuning hardware, you write queries to transform your data and extract valuable insights.