Reading the SQL Azure tea leaves

jamiet — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 09:10:00 GMT

Social media! Its like garlic bread....its the future. I've tasted it!!!

Ahem...ok...perhaps not. Still, I do get a lot of useful information from various social media outlets that I inhabit and just this morning I spotted something on LinkedIn that really caught my eye. Topping the "People you may know" list was a General Manager (SQL Azure Analytics) at Microsoft Corporation who had the following job title listed on his profile:

Cloudscale Predictive Analytics (SQL Azure Cloud Data Services Platform)

Hmmm...now what could that mean I wonder? Is SQL Azure going to be introducing an analytics platform at some point? Is "Cloudscale Predictive Analytics" a product name? Its certainly clear that Microsoft are piling a lot of resources into SQL Azure so news that an analytics platform is in the offing should come as no great surprise; I am hoping for some announcements in this area at the forthcoming PASS Summit.

More interesting still was that the same guy also listed Semantic Insight, Indexing and Classification (SQL Server Semantic Platform) amongst his previous roles. The SQL Server Semantic platform is something I covered in my earlier blog posts Microsoft Semantic Engine & Microsoft Semantic Engine Uncovered - the harnessing of unstructured data and which I am expecting to rise to prominence in future versions of SQL Server (be they on-premise or cloud-based); will the Semantic Engine appear in SQL Azure before elsewhere? Who knows! I shall be watching with interest!

@Jamiet

UPDATE: OK, a little bit more on this. Clicking on a few more links takes me to the guy's blog where he says:

Approachable, semantic, and self-organizing. No one wants to have to deal with the tera- and peta-bytes of information that they are exposed to daily. People need the right kinds of filters to find and use the information that is most relevant to them. Learning what those filters should be is part of the Semantic Engine's role. This is where a background service integrated deeply with the power of SQL Server and Cloud services like SQL Azure makes all of the difference.

That was from December 2009 and I'm sure things have moved on significantly since then! This is getting more and more intriguing!!

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Reading the SQL Azure tea leaves