Happy New Year! Today we are announcing the release of a number a exciting new offerings on DataMarket – both public and commercial! Take a look at some of the great new data we have:

• D&B

• D&B Business Lookup - Use this data to identify the DUNS number of the business you wish to obtain more detailed information on. You use this service to get the DUNS number prior to using other D&B offerings, all of which require this DUNS number & Country code as input parameters.
• D&B Corporate Linkage Packet - Use this data to identify who the immediate domestic and global ultimate holding companies are of the business in question. Identify a company and its location with corporate linkage information such as parent/headquarter, domestic & global ultimate companies
• D&B Enterprise Risk Management packet - This packet of data provides globally consistent information from around the world in real time, enabling you to improve the timeliness and consistency of your credit decisions and help prioritize collection efforts by matching your company's credit policies and conditions with D&B credit scores and ratings.
• D&B Risk Management Business Verification Packet - Use this data to identify & verify a company and its location with background information such as primary name, address, phone number, SIC code, branch indicator and D&B® D-U-N-S® number.
• D&B Risk Management Decision Support Packet - This packet of data provides consistent information in real time, enabling you to improve the timeliness and consistency of your credit decisions and help prioritize collection efforts by matching your company's credit policies and conditions with D&B credit scores and ratings. Information includes company identification, payment trends and delinquencies, public record filings, high level Financials and key risk factors, including the commercial credit score and the financial stress score.
• D&B Risk Management Delinquency Score packet - This packet of data provides consistent information in real time, enabling you to increase the speed and accuracy of your organization's decision making. Use this data to help predict the likelihood of a company paying your invoices in a severely delinquent manner (90+ days past terms) over the next 12 months so that you can make faster, more informed decisions on whether to accept, set terms, or reject an account.
• D&B Risk Management Financial Standing packet - Use this data to assess a company's financial strength with data such as sales volumes, net worth, assets and liabilities. Information includes company identification, firmographic information, public filings indicators, equity, assets, liabilities and the D&B® Rating
• D&B Risk Management Quick Check packet - This packet of information delivers comprehensive risk insight from D&B's database. Use this information to perform high level credit assessments and pre-screen prospects with D&B's core credit evaluation data. Information includes company identification, payment activity summary, public filings indicators, high level Equity and the D&B® Rating
• D&B Vendor Management, Enrichment Data Packet - This packet of information delivers comprehensive supplier insight from D&B's database. Included are company identity and demographic information such as name, address, telephone, DUNS number, SIC Code, employees and years in business. Also delivered are 5 of D&B's risk ratings.
• D&B Vendor Qualification with Linkage and Diversity Data Packet - This packet of information delivers Supplier Qualification insight from D&B's database. Included are company identity and demographic information such as legal name, address, telephone number, DUNS number, Congressional District, SIC Code and Years In Business. Also delivered are 2 of D&B's key risk components.
• D&B Vendor Qualification with Linkage, Enrichment Data Packet - This packet of information delivers Supplier Qualification insight from D&B's database. Included are company identity and demographic information such as legal name, address, telephone number, DUNS number, SIC Code and Years In Business. Also delivered are 2 of D&B's key risk components.
• D&B Vendor Qualification, Enrichment Data Packet - This packet of information delivers Supplier Qualification insight from D&B's database. Included are company identity and demographic information such as legal name, address, telephone number, DUNS number, SIC Code and Years In Business. Also delivered are 2 of D&B's key risk components.

• ESRI

• 2010 Key US Demographics by ZIP Code, Place and County - Esri 2010 Key US Demographics by ZIP Code, Place, and County Data is a select offering of the demographic data required to understand a market. ‘Esri 2010 Key Demographics’ contains current-year updates for 14 key demographic variables. Click here to see a trial version of this offer.

• StrikeIron

• Sales and Use Tax Rates Complete - Uses a USA ZIP code or Canadian postal code to get the general sales and use tax rate levels for the state, county, city, MTA, SPD and more, including multiple tax jurisdictions within a single ZIP code (where county boundaries cross a ZIP code for example), and also includes multiple levels of tax rates such as MTA and SPD data, and 4 'other' tax rate fields.
• US Address Verification - This service corrects, completes, and enhances US addresses utilizing data from the United States Postal Service. It adds ZIP+4 data, provides delivery point verification, gives congressional districts, carrier routes, latitude, and longitude, and much more. Every element of an address is inspected to ensure its validity using sophisticated matching and data standardization technology.

• United Nations

• National Accounts Official Country Data - United Nations Statistics Division - The database contains detailed official national accounts statistics in national currencies as provided by the National Statistical Offices. Data is available for most of the countries or areas of the world. For the majority of countries data is available form 1970 up to the year t-1.

As we post more datasets to the site we will be sure to update you here on our blog… and be sure to check the site regularly to learn more about the latest data offerings.

- The DataMarket Team

As part of the Real World DataMarket series, we talked to Ellie Fields, Director of Product Marketing at Tableau Software, about using DataMarket, part of the Windows Azure Marketplace, to add premium content as a data source option in its data visualization software. Here’s what she had to say:

MSDN: Can you tell us more about Tableau Software and the products you offer?

Fields: Tableau Software offers “rapid-fire business intelligence.” Tableau has proprietary technology developed at Stanford University that enables users to drag and drop data from data sources to quickly transform text into rich data visualizations.

MSDN: What were the biggest challenges that Tableau Software faced prior to adopting DataMarket?

Fields: Data is proliferating everywhere, but it can be difficult and time-consuming for customers to find, purchase, and format data to augment their existing data sources. It’s like the Wild West of data out there, with data available everywhere and in any imaginable format. We’re always looking to improve our service offerings, but it’s a fine line—we want to deliver valuable services, but we don’t want to take our focus away from what we do best, which is data visualization.

MSDN: Can you describe how Tableau Software is using DataMarket to help tame the Wild West of data?

Fields: After the 5.0 release of Tableau Software, one of our developers coded a basic integration into DataMarket during one of our “hackathons.” We were so impressed with the opportunity to access premium content via DataMarket that we decided to include DataMarket as a data source option in our products. Now, when customers use Tableau, they see DataMarket as a data source option. They simply provide their DataMarket account key for authentication and then find the data sets they want to use. Customers can import the data into Tableau and combine that information with their own corporate data for deep business intelligence.

Figure 1: When using Tableau, customers see DataMarket as a data source option.

MSDN: What makes your solution unique and how does DataMarket play a role in that unique quality?

Fields: Unlike other data visualization software, Tableau Software gives customers the ability to simply drag and drop data to create business intelligence. Using DataMarket supports that same idea by offering premium content that is already structured and formatted, and easily available. Customers don’t have to spend valuable time seeking out and formatting the data before integrating it with their own data for rich visualizations. For example, they can add population data to their sales data to assess regions for growth.

MSDN: What kinds of benefits is Tableau Software realizing with DataMarket?

Fields: We have been able to add a valuable service for our customers—the data sets that customers can access in DataMarket are of tremendous value for creating very rich business intelligence. What’s really great is that we were able to very quickly and easily add access to DataMarket in the Tableau line of products, thanks to the DataMarket API, and did so while maintaining laser-sharp focus on our core business.

Read the full story at:
www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000009036

To learn more, visit:
https://datamarket.azure.com

As part of the Real World DataMarket series, we talked to Joseph Albahari, developer of LINQPad, about his product’s support for DataMarket, a part of Windows Azure Marketplace. Here’s what he had to say:

MSDN: How did you come to develop LINQPad?

Albahari: When Microsoft first announced LINQ, I came to realize that it was one of the best technologies that Microsoft had produced. LINQ is a significantly more productive querying language than traditional SQL. It’s simpler, tidier, higher-level, type-safe, and its queries are composable. Not having to worry about lower-level details when I write my queries is a big win. I was so impressed with LINQ that I built a tool—LINQPad—to take advantage of it. LINQPad brings the same interactive experience to LINQ that SQL Server Management Studio brings to SQL: you simply point LINQPad to a database, write a query, and hit Run. After writing LINQPad, I realized that I’d in fact written something broader than a LINQ tool—I had written a code scratchpad that executed not only LINQ queries, but any C# or Microsoft Visual Basic code snippet! LINQPad complements the Microsoft Visual Studio development system nicely: you write, test, and tune queries and code snippets interactively in LINQPad, and then paste working code right into a Visual Studio project.

MSDN: What’s been the reaction of the developer community?

Albahari: Developers have responded enthusiastically. Over the past three years, LINQPad has been downloaded around 250,000 times and has probably tens of thousands of active users.

MSDN: Tell me what brought you to support cloud-based data in LINQPad?

Albahari: Data used to exist mostly in databases on the same network. But now data has found a new home: in the cloud. LINQPad has supported Microsoft SQL Azure for some time, but there was a demand for OData [Open Data Protocol]-based services. OData is a protocol for querying and updating data across the Internet. The great thing about LINQ is that the same querying language works with a multitude of providers. So, if you know LINQ, you can write OData queries—the provider takes the same LINQ query and translates it into an OData URI [Uniform Resource Identifier] instead of SQL.

MSDN: Why did you decide to support Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket in particular?

Albahari: Having a centralized portal for OData services makes a lot of sense. In particular, it offers the potential for unified billing for premium data sources. I anticipate a growing user base, so I want to offer these people an interactive querying tool.

MSDN: What’s the basis of DataMarket support in LINQPad?

Albahari: One of the keys to supporting DataMarket in LINQPad is OData. I’d already built OData support into LINQPad by leveraging OData support within the Microsoft .NET Framework. This made it easy to write a DataMarket driver that gives developers LINQPad support for DataMarket “out of the box.” To use that support, developers choose DataMarket as a data source for LINQPad. The LINQPad software also gives them the option to sign up for DataMarket, to subscribe to datasets, and to browse for their account keys to the Microsoft service. Developers can then compose LINQ queries and execute them against DataMarket, with the results appearing immediately in LINQPad. It’s that easy.

Read the full story at:
www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000008920

To read more about DataMarket, visit:
https://datamarket.azure.com