For any big data project to be successful, the key is to gain actionable information from the vast amount of data collected in the Data Lake. The familiar Microsoft Excel has several add-ins that make it a powerful business intelligence tool that allows one to model, analyze, report, and publish rich and interactive reports. PowerPivot, Power Query, Power BI, and Power Map work with data in HDInsight and other SQL stores.

Hadoop ecosystem has several additional tools such as RHadoop, Apache Giraph, and Apache Mahout. These allow data scientists and statisticians to detect patterns, predict future trends, and perform data mining.

In the next chapter, we will see some of the preview and new features of HDInsight that further enhance the Data Lake capabilities.