It has been an eventful week for the Azure DataMarket. We had three new and exciting (for geeks like me) things happening in that corner of the Microsoft universe:
1. Speed!
There was an update to the Azure DataMarket a few days ago. It was, in my opinion, the best thing Microsoft could have done to their offering – tremendously increase its performance. While the DataMarket was previously plagued by unacceptably slow download speed, now it’s for feed standards blazingly fast. For comparison sake, I used to wait for more than 40 minutes when downloading an approximately 70k rows feed from the DataMarket prior to the update. Now, it is on my machine in around 5 – 8-fold increase in performance! Rumours have it that on faster-than-my-home-ADSL2+-networks we will be experiencing up to 20x better performance. It would be good to hear if this is actually correct for developers on such networks (please comment).
Next, range queries, hopefully…
2. Portal
While before the last couple of days anyone who wanted to publish data on the DataMarket had to contact the Microsoft team via email and ask how to get it done, we have just moved into the self-service space with a new portal allowing publishers to create and manage their feeds. The link to this new portal is:
https://publish.marketplace.windowsazure.com/
And, you can find some very helpful documentation about it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh563871.aspx
3. DateStream
Finally, I am proud to announce that the great DateStream feed got translated in four more languages:
– Hebrew and Danish – thanks to Rafi Asraf
– German
– Bulgarian
The Italian translation (thanks to Marco Russo) is coming soon too, but missed this release unfortunately.
Feel free to explore them and let me know if anything needs to be changed to make them more correct/useful.
Boyan Penev on Microsoft BI 