I will be presenting the session “Modern Data Warehousing” on Saturday at the PASS SQLSaturday Business Analytics edition in Dallas at 4:30pm CST (info).  The abstract for my session is below.  I hope you can make it!

Modern Data Warehousing

The traditional data warehouse has served us well for many years, but new trends are causing it to break in four different ways: data growth, fast query expectations from users, non-relational/unstructured data, and cloud-born data.  How can you prevent this from happening?  Enter the modern data warehouse, which is able to handle and excel with these new trends.  It handles all types of data (Hadoop), provides a way to easily interface with all these types of data (PolyBase), and can handle “big data” and provide fast queries.  Is there one appliance that can support this modern data warehouse?  Yes!  It is the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) from Microsoft, which is a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) appliance that has been recently updated (v2 AU1).  In this session I will dig into the details of the modern data warehouse and PDW.  I will give an overview of the PDW hardware and software architecture, identify what makes PDW different, and demonstrate the increased performance.  In addition I will discuss how Hadoop, HDInsight, and PolyBase fit into this new modern data warehouse.