Cloud data warehouse race heats up

The notion of running a data warehouse in the cloud was a pretty novel thing when Amazon Web Services launched its Redshift service in November of 2012. Most on-premises data warehouse (DW) platforms are appliance-based, which makes them difficult to expand, and the resulting need to leave room for growth also makes them expensive to acquire.

In the cloud though, economics are better, elasticity is realistic and logistics are streamlined. Combine that with the ability to handle "big data" volumes with the familiar SQL/relational model that Redshift uses and it’s hardly surprising that the service has been one of Amazon’s fastest growing since its launch…

 

Amazon has essentially had the cloud DW space to itself this whole time, but that changed in a big way this week. One new competitor, Snowflake Computing, went into general availability on Tuesday with its cloud DW service, as it closed on a $45M Series C funding round. And Microsoft, Amazon’s growing nemesis in the cloud, launched a limited but public preview of its Azure SQL Data Warehouse service on Wednesday…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-data-warehouse-race-heats-up/