Anshul Rampal announces CTP 3.1 of SQL Server 2019:
The big data clusters feature continues to add key capabilities for its initial release in SQL Server 2019. This month, the release extends the Apache Spark™ functionality for the feature by supporting the ability to read and write to data pool external tables directly as well as a mechanism to scale compute separately from storage for compute-intensive workloads. Both enhancements should make it easier to integrate Apache Spark™ workloads into your SQL Server environment and leverage each of their strengths. Beyond Apache Spark™, this month’s release also includes machine learning extensions with MLeap where you can train a model in Apache Spark™ and then deploy it for use in SQL Server through the recently released Java extensibility functionality in SQL Server CTP 3.0. This should make it easier for data scientists to write models in Apache Spark™ and then deploy them into production SQL Server environments for both periodic training and full production against the trained model in a single environment.
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