“Big Data” is undeniably one of the more prevalent buzzwords of the last year or two, and given the scalability inherent to the cloud, it’s a natural fit for Windows Azure. Microsoft's specific foray into this burgeoning technology is the HDInsight service (previously known as Hadoop on Azure).

With HDInsight, Microsoft has become a significant player in the Hadoop ecosystem; moreover, the integration of existing Business Intelligence tools, like Excel’s PowerPivot, makes this technology readily accessible and consumable from the desktop. Join me for this episode for Practical Azure for a tour of the HDInsight offering and a look at the contributions Windows Azure is making back to the open-source community in this area.