Microsoft announced on February 7 local time its data analysis service Azure SQL Data Warehouse (Azure SQL Data Warehouse) benchmark results. The results show that the performance of the Microsoft Azure SQL data warehouse (TPC-H benchmark) is 14 times higher than Google’s BigQuery and Amazon’s Redshift, but at the same time, its price is cheaper (testing against SQL data warehouse clusters, Microsoft is 94% cheaper than Google and 31% cheaper than Amazon. Last year, Amazon claimed that its Redshift service was twice as fast as the single-user Microsoft Azure SQL data warehouse and 1.6 times faster than the four concurrent users’ Microsoft Azure SQL data warehouse. Here, we are happy to see Microsoft surpassing its competitors. However, if Microsoft and Amazon can measure the performance of their solutions with a common set of benchmarks, that would be great. Because if there is no standard way to measure performance, the performance of Microsoft’s services with its competitors may be difficult to put together and objectively compare.
The Azure cloud business is now one of Microsoft’s most important businesses. According to an IT home report on January 31 this year, Microsoft’s second-quarter earnings report for 2019 shows that Microsoft’s smart cloud service revenues reached $9.4 billion, an increase of 20% (21% at constant exchange rates). Server and cloud service revenues rose 24% (24% at constant exchange rates) and Azure Cloud revenue grew 76%. Corporate services revenue rose 6% (7% at constant exchange rates).