Azure Analysis Services now available in Azure Government

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Azure Analysis Services in the Microsoft Cloud for Government. Based on the proven analytics engine in SQL Server Analysis Services, Azure Analysis Services is an enterprise-grade OLAP engine and BI modeling platform, offered as a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Azure Analysis Services enables developers and BI professionals to create BI Semantic Models that can power highly interactive and rich analytical experiences in BI tools and custom applications.

BI professionals can build and manage enterprise scale data models with SQL Server Data Tools, Visual Studio, and SQL Management Studio. Users can easily connect to Azure Analysis Services with powerful data visualization tools such as Power BI and Excel. In addition, third party BI tools, such as Tableau, are also supported.

BI professionals can use Power Query to import data from a variety of data sources including Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and HDInsight, or on-premises data sources such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Teradata. With support for large data models, Azure Analysis Services offers a robust approach to manage the security of the data model including Azure Active Directory identity management and row- and column-level security. Please use the following resources to learn more about Azure Analysis Services, get your questions answered, and give us feedback and suggestions about the product.

Overview
Documentation
Azure regions
MSDN forum
Ideas & suggestions

Join us at Microsoft Ignite from September 24 – 29, 2017, or at the SQL PASS Summit 2017 from October 31 – November 3, 2017 where you can hear directly from our engineers and product managers.
Quelle: Azure

Introducing faster GPUs for Google Compute Engine

By Chris Kleban and Ari Liberman, Product Managers for Google Compute Engine

Today, we’re happy to make some massively parallel announcements for Cloud GPUs. First, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) gets another performance boost with the public launch of NVIDIA P100 GPUs in beta. Second, NVIDIA K80 GPUs are now generally available on Google Compute Engine. Third, we’re happy to announce the introduction of sustained use discounts on both the K80 and P100 GPUs.

Cloud GPUs can accelerate your workloads including machine learning training and inference, geophysical data processing, simulation, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics and many more high performance compute use cases.

The NVIDIA Tesla P100 is the state of the art of GPU technology. Based on the Pascal GPU architecture, you can increase throughput with fewer instances while saving money. P100 GPUs can accelerate your workloads by up to 10x compared to K801.

Compared to traditional solutions, Cloud GPUs provide an unparalleled combination of flexibility, performance and cost-savings:

Flexibility: Google’s custom VM shapes and incremental Cloud GPUs provide the ultimate amount of flexibility. Customize the CPU, memory, disk and GPU configuration to best match your needs.  
Fast performance: Cloud GPUs are offered in passthrough mode to provide bare-metal performance. Attach up to 4 P100 or 8 K80 per VM (we offer up to 4 K80 boards, that come with 2 GPUs per board). For those looking for higher disk performance, optionally attach up to 3TB of Local SSD to any GPU VM. 
Low cost: With Cloud GPUs you get the same per-minute billing and Sustained Use Discounts that you do for the rest of GCP’s resources. Pay only for what you need! 
Cloud integration: Cloud GPUs are available at all levels of the stack. For infrastructure, Compute Engine and Google Container Enginer allow you to run your GPU workloads with VMs or containers. For machine learning, Cloud Machine Learning can be optionally configured to utilize GPUs in order to reduce the time it takes to train your models at scale with TensorFlow. 

With today’s announcement, you can now deploy both the NVIDIA Tesla P100 and K80 GPUs in four regions worldwide. All of our GPUs can now take advantage of sustained use discounts, which automatically lower the price (up to 30%), of your virtual machines when you use them to run sustained workloads. No lock-in or upfront minimum fee commitments are needed to take advantage of these discounts.

Cloud GPUs Regions Availability – Number of Zones

Speed up machine learning workloads 

Since launching GPUs, we’ve seen customers benefit from the extra computation they provide to accelerate workloads ranging from genomics and computational finance to training and inference on machine learning models. One of our customers, Shazam, was an early adopter of GPUs on GCP to power their music recognition service.

“For certain tasks, [NVIDIA] GPUs are a cost-effective and high-performance alternative to traditional CPUs. They work great with Shazam’s core music recognition workload, in which we match snippets of user-recorded audio fingerprints against our catalog of over 40 million songs. We do that by taking the audio signatures of each and every song, compiling them into a custom database format and loading them into GPU memory. Whenever a user Shazams a song, our algorithm uses GPUs to search that database until it finds a match. This happens successfully over 20 million times per day.”   

— Ben Belchak, Head of Site Reliability Engineering, Shazam

With today’s Cloud GPU announcements, GCP takes another step toward being the optimal place for any hardware-accelerated workload. With the addition of NVIDIA P100 GPUs, our primary focus is to help you bring new use cases to life. To learn more about how your organization can benefit from Cloud GPUs and Compute Engine, visit the GPU site and get started today!

1 The 10x performance boost compares 1 P100 GPU versus 1 K80 GPU (½ of a K80 board) for machine learning inference workloads that benefits from the P100 FP16 precision. Performance will vary by workload. Download this datasheet for more information.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

September updates to the Azure Analysis Services web designer

In July, we released the Azure Analysis Services web designer. This new browser-based experience allows developers to start creating and managing Azure Analysis Services (AAS) semantic models quickly and easily. While SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) are still the primary tools for development, this new experience is intended to make modeling fast and easy. It is great for getting started on a new model or to do things such as adding a new measure to an existing model.

Today we are announcing the release of the September update which brings along with it some new features as well as several bug fixes. New features include:

Improved measure editing

We have redesigned the measure editor to allow you make changes to multiple measures and then save them all in one transaction instead of saving them one at a time.

Bulk renaming

Often when when you start creating a model, your table and column names match what the underlying database has and are not always user friendly. Now, you can select all the column and tables that you wish to rename and then select “edit multiple selection” in properties under name.

This will bring up the bulk rename dialog. Here you can rename all the columns and save in one transaction.

Auto arrange tables

Clicking “Arrange All” at the bottom of the table list will arrange all the tables in the diagram rather then adding them one at a time. The layout can then be saved for future use.

You can try the Azure Analysis web designer today by linking to it from a server in the Azure portal.

Submit your own ideas for features on our feedback forum. Learn more about Azure Analysis Services and the Azure Analysis Services web designer.
Quelle: Azure