Microsoft offers a complete and still growing cloud ecosystem for data processing in Azure. In this chapter, we mentioned all of the SQL Server and SQL database scenarios, but there are also other technologies such as Data Factory for ETL processes, machine learning for building of predictive models and analytics, and so on and so forth, but those technologies and features are out of the scope of this book.
In the first section, we summarized scenarios of a data platform fully placed into the cloud. The first of them, Azure SQL database, is provided as a service hosting isolated databases. The second option is Azure SQL Server as a virtual machine hosted in strong and extremely reliable cloud virtual environment. The last of them is a very powerful Azure SQL Data Warehouse service used to maintain a load balanced and massively parallel data warehouse fulfilling the most...