A few years ago, I was listening a session on Azure SQL Data Warehouse at an event. At the time, one of the features I found fascinating was the separation of the storage from the compute portions of the service. We could load a lot of data in the system and pay for the storage, but we could spin up and down compute nodes to essentially scale out query processing to match our workloads. Azure Data Lake has something similar, and I was excited. I wasn't excited about ASDW or ASDL because I don't really use those platforms in my work, and I don't have customers to talk to about those. I think they are useful, just not for me. I was, however, impressed with the technology, hoping that it would be coming in the next few years to SQL Server in the box and Azure SQL Database.   Read the rest of Technology Flows Downstream