Microsoft announces new updates to Azure HDInsight with up to 25x faster query performance

Microsoft today announced no.of updates to Azure HDInsight that make Hadoop enterprise-ready in the cloud. Azure HDInsight is a managed Hadoop and Spark cloud services from Microsoft. It now offers the most security capabilities of any cloud Hadoop solution, big data query speeds that approach data warehousing performance, and new notebook experiences for data scientists all on the latest Hortonworks Data Platform 2.5 and Spark 2.0 platform.

• Advanced security features – New security features such as Authentication and Identity Management, Central Security Policy Administration,  and Encryption for data protection will give customers increased levels of security for authentication, authorization and encryption.
• The first Cloud Hadoop solution to onboard LLAP (Long Lived and Process) from the Stinger.Next initiatives, which promises sub-second querying on big data, which is 25x faster query performance than existing Hive.
• Microsoft has partnered with Simba to deliver an ODBC driver for Azure HDInsight that can be used with world-class BI tools like Power BI, Tableau and QlikView. Together, this allows business analysts to gain insights over big data using their tool of choice.
• Real-time streaming ingestion for IoT scenarios with Apache Kafka – Azure HDInsight support for Apache Kafka works with Spark and Apache Storm for a combined solution that can ingest large, fast streams of data, ideal for a variety of IoT scenarios.
• New notebook experiences for data scientists on the latest Hortonworks Data Platform 2.5 and Spark 2.0 platform

Read about these updates in detail here.