Lots of Azure news coming through this time of the year in the lead up to Microsoft Ignite AU. Azure News below, as heard on the Need to Know podcast. Follow the Need to Know podcast on Twitter @n2kpodcast. In the lead up to Microsoft Ignite, we are featuring on the podcast all the presenters that are presenting at Microsoft Ignite.
Azure Invoices now attachable to monthly billing email in Azure Direct
The ability to have your monthly Azure invoice statement emailed to you is now generally available direct from the Azure Portal. As the account admin, navigate to your subscription at http://portal.azure.com and select “Send my Invoice” on the left navigation bar.
From here, accept the opt-in agreement and you’re all set! Optionally you can configure additional recipients for this email.
Alternately you can also access this from the Invoices blade:
- To access this opt-in, you must be the account admin or else the button will not be visible.
- This only applies to subscriptions in the direct channel, EA or CSP subscriptions will not be able to leverage this feature.
Azure Analysis Services now available in North Central US and Brazil South
Last October Microsoft released the preview of Azure Analysis Services, which is built on the proven analytics engine in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. With Azure Analysis Services you can host semantic data models in the cloud. Users in your organization can then connect to your data models using tools like Excel, Power BI, and many others to create reports and perform ad-hoc data analysis.
You probably think this sounds like a broken record, you might be right, Just last week we informed people of the announcement that Azure Analysis Services was available in two new regions Southeast Asia and East US 2.
Microsoft have now announced again that the preview of Azure Analysis Services is now available in 2 additional regions: North Central US and Brazil South. This means that Azure Analysis Services is available in the following regions: Brazil South, Southeast Asia, North Europe, West Europe, West US, South Central US, North Central UA, East US 2 and West Central US.
Microsoft Quarter 2 Financial Year 2017 Earnings
Microsoft today announced Financial Year Quarter 2 2017 earnings results. Revenue is $24.1 billion and the operating income was $6.2 billion. Net income was $5.2 billion GAAP, and $6.5 billion non-GAAP.
Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $6.9 billion, this increased 8%.
- Server products and cloud services revenue increased 12%
- Azure revenue increased 93% with Azure compute usage more than doubling year-over-year
- Enterprise Services revenue decreased 4% with declines in custom support agreements offset by growth in Premier Support Services and consulting
Server products revenue grew 5% with server products premium revenue growing in double digits.
Loading data into Azure SQL Data Warehouse just got easier
Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a SQL-based fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud solution for data warehousing. SQL Data Warehouse is highly elastic, enabling you to provision in minutes and scale capacity in seconds.
Since announcing general availability of Azure SQL Data Warehouse in July 2016, Microsoft are helping people get data into their Data Warehouse much faster to generate insights faster and grow businesses further. The way they’re doing this is by using PolyBase, a feature built into the SQL Engine. It effectively leverages the entire Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture of Azure SQL Data Warehouse to provide the fastest loading mechanism from Azure Blob Storage into the Data Warehouse.
You can use Azure Data Factory Copy Wizard to load 1TB data in under 15 mins into Azure SQL Data Warehouse, at over 1.2 GB per second throughput.
Marc Kean 