Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence in the Cloud with #Azure: How do we get good, fast, cheap and easy?

Customers want their data good, fast, cheap and easy. A tall order, right?

One of the biggest challenges that I see with data warehousing in the cloud is that customers are concerned with cost. I was interested to see the Gigaom report on the topic of Data Warehousing in the cloud, which contained a number of benchmarks, including cost.

The study by GigaOm showed that Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now outperforming the competition up to a whopping 14x times at up to 17 times cheaper than the competition, namely, Google BigQuery and AWS Redshift. This is an incredible achievement and the Azure team should be proud!

As part of my work in Business Intelligence, often, this involves a move to the cloud by default. Simply put, customers want quick Business Intelligence and they don’t want to spend time or effort in looking after kit. They want to delegate the responsibility. This means that cost is a key differentiator, since they want their data, good, fast and cheap. I’m glad to see that the Azure SQL Datawarehouse is competing on cost and performance since customers do want their data good, fast, cheap and easy.

Customers also want their data easy and this is where Power BI comes in. If a customer wants to use Power BI, I generally recommend that they put their data into Azure so that the data is traversing the Azure network. This means that the customer is not paying to extract or access their data from another cloud system and then put it into Power BI.

The Gigaom paper on cloud data warehousing is worth a read – and I am not just saying that because I‘ve done work as a Gigaom analyst! You can access the paper here.