SQL Server Big Data Clusters (BDC) is a new capability brought to market as part of the SQL Server 2019 release. BDC extends SQL Server’s analytical capabilities beyond in-database processing of transactional and analytical workloads by uniting the SQL engine with Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop to create a single, secure and unified data platform.
In the most recent releases, SQL Server went beyond relational data and enabled support for graph data, R, and Python machine learning, while making SQL Server available on Linux and containers in addition to Windows. At the same time, organizations are challenged with the amount of data stored in different formats, in silos, and the expertise required to extract value out of the data.