Microsoft wants to bring data and machine intelligence closer together
- by 7wData
For Microsoft, the last year or so has been all about infusing its various products with “intelligence.” Those smarts may come in the form of advanced analytics or deep learning, but the main point here is that the company believes these techniques can solve major pain points for its customers, whether they are PowerPoint users or SQL Server admins. Today, at its data Amp event, the company is launching a number of updates that make it easier for developers who use Microsoft’s tools to bring “intelligence” to their own apps.
At today’s event, Microsoft is launching updates to the preview of SQL Server 2017 (technically, this is the Community Technology Preview 2.0), which will likely become generally available later this year (no surprise, given its name), as well as its Cognitive Services. SQL Server 2017, it’s worth noting, is also the first version to run on Linux and in Docker containers.
As Microsoft’s Rohan Kumar, the company’s general manager for database systems, told me, the basics of database management have essentially been commoditized now. What users are looking for now is better ways to get value out of the data they are storing. What Microsoft’s partners were telling it was that it was still too hard to build intelligence into applications and that they wanted more of that intelligence to be directly available in the database.
So with today’s update, Microsoft announced that it is building support for Python right into SQL Server 2017. That may sound like a minor thing at first, but the vast majority of machine learning frameworks rely on Python. Making it easier to access Python scripts right from the database means it’s also easier to use machine learning techniques on this data instead of having to first move it out of the database, let it go stale and then try to build machine learning models on it.
Indeed, it’s this idea of bringing data and AI closer together that’s driving many of these decisions.
[Social9_Share class=”s9-widget-wrapper”]
Upcoming Events
Strategies for simplifying complex Salesforce data migrations – Free Webinar
27 March 2024
5 PM CET – 6 PM CET
Read MoreCategories
You Might Be Interested In
What Professional Sports Can Teach us About Data-Driven Competitive Advantage
12 Oct, 2016Fall is a special time of year for North American professional sports. Autumn gives us the MLB playoffs, the start …
How Growth-Driven Design Impacts on Your Sales Process and Why You Shouldn’t Ignore It
27 Jan, 2017When I first got into digital marketing as a career change a few years back (I had previously worked as …
How big data gives businesses the nose for smelling what’s selling
9 Aug, 2017The sheer scale of businesses such as Sainsbury’s allows for an incredibly detailed picture of consumer habits, to transform and …
Recent Jobs
Do You Want to Share Your Story?
Bring your insights on Data, Visualization, Innovation or Business Agility to our community. Let them learn from your experience.