Does Microsoft have a similar product like Google BigQuery? [closed]

Question

I want to see whether Microsoft provide a similar service to Google BigQuery.

I want to run some queries on a database with the size of ~15GB and I want the service to be on the cloud.

P.S: Yes. I have google already but did not find anything similar.

Answer 1

The answer to your question is NO: Microsoft does not offer (yet) a real time big data query service where you pay as you perform queries. Which does not means you won't get a solution to your problem in Azure.

Depending on your need you may have two options on Azure:

1. SQL Data Warehouse: A new Azure based columnar database service in preview http://azure.microsoft.com/fr-fr/documentation/services/sql-data-warehouse/ which according to Microsoft can scale up to petabytes. Assuming that your data is structured (relational) and that you need sub second response time it should do the job you expect.

2. HDInsight is hadoop managed service https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/hdinsight-component-versioning/ which can deal better with semi structured data but is more oriented to batch processing. It contains Hive which is also SQL like but you won't get instant query response-time. You could go for this option if you are expecting to do calculations on a batch mode and store the aggregated result set somewhere else.

The main difference of these products and BigQuery is the prizing model in BigQuery you pay as you perform queries but in Micrisoft options you pay based on the resources you allocate, which can be very expensive if you data is really big.

I think if the expected usage is occasional BigQuery will be much cheaper, Misrosoft options will be better for intense use, but of course you will need to do a detailed prize comparison to be sure.

Answer 2

To get an idea of what BigQuery really is, and how it compares to a relational database (or Hadoop for that matter), take a look at this doc:

https://cloud.google.com/files/BigQueryTechnicalWP.pdf