Windows Azure HDInsight service is the new Hadoop Azure service that Microsoft now offers.  This service will provide core big data analytics services for Azure cloud users, and it nicely rounds out the Azure database services.  The company has actually been running Windows Azure HDInsight in full production mode, at least for select clients, for a couple of months.

Windows Azure HDInsight provides a copy of the Apache Hadoop data processing platform and associated tools. HDInsight will use the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which is the flagship Hadoop distribution offered by Hortonworks.

This is a bit of a divergence for Microsoft, who likes to offer their own tooling in Azure, based upon traditional Microsoft application development tools and databases.  However, the growth of Hadoop has driven most public cloud providers to offer Hadoop services, and Microsoft is no exception.

The reality is that Hadoop is not a transactional database, which is Microsoft’s bread and butter.  Indeed, the movement to Hadoop could drive the sales of more SQL Servers.  I suspect Microsoft already did that math.