Describe a modern data warehouse
A modern data warehouse lets you bring together all your data at any scale easily, and means you can get insights through analytical dashboards, operational reports, or advanced analytics for all your users.
The pace of change in both the capabilities of technologies, and the elastic nature of cloud services has meant that new opportunities have been presented to evolve the data warehouse to handle modern workloads including:
Increased volumes of data
Microsoft Azure services have the capability to scale its capacity to meet the demands that an organization faces as its data grows. In traditional on-premises data, scaling on-premises servers is a non-trivial task that involves costs, procurement of additional hardware, as well as potential disruption to the business to meet the demand. With Azure, services such as Azure Synapse Analytics can be scaled at the click of a button, and can even be auto-scaled.
New varieties of data
Staging data is also simplified using Azure Data Lake Store Gen2, which can store a wide variety of data in its raw format, making the process of ingesting data into a data warehouse much easier.
Traditional data warehouses in the past have had difficulty in handling certain types of data. For example, extrapolating data from sources such as PDF files through to sound files were either too complex or cost prohibitive. The improvements in AI technologies such as Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure AI Speech means that these types of data sources can now be passed through a Azure AI service and outputted in a text-based format that can be stored in the Azure Data Lake Store Gen2, along with the source files themselves.
Data velocities
Traditional on-premises data warehouses in the main have dealt with the batch movement of data based on a schedule. Some organization may build real-time data warehouse if the business needs are compelling and the organization can absorb the cost of the implementation. Azure has made it easier and much more cost effective to provision streaming services that can interact with a wide variety of services so that a modern data warehouse can deliver solutions in a batch or a real-time manner without the obstruction of cost.