Terry McCann gives us a primer on ONNX:
Let me introduce you to ONNX. ONNX or the Open Neural Network eXchange is a runtime which can take a model, that you have trained in PyTorch or Tensorflow and encapsulate it in an ONNX format which is executed on something running the ONNX runtime. This new model can be trained in Python and deployed on an ML.net application, with no need for integration coding.
We have spent a huge amount of time creating different Docker containers for different types of models, the Tensorflow container or the PyTorch container or a container running in our model in Spark, the list goes on. That way of working is kind of becoming defunct. ONNX really breaks that down into a simple standard runtime that you can start working with and you can deploy your model into multiple different environments and ensure that is runs on your database, on your website, on your mobile device and also at the edge.
Terry has a video as well. I like the fact that ONNX exists and also that it’s available in Azure SQL Edge (in part because I want it available on-premises as well).