The SQL Server team drops bad news on a Friday:
Today, we are announcing the retirement of PolyBase scale-out groups in Microsoft SQL Server. Scale-out group functionality will be removed from the product in SQL Server 2022. In-market SQL Server 2019, 2017, and 2016 will continue to support the functionality to the end of support for those products.
In addition to killing Big Data Clusters, they’re also killing the Java connector in PolyBase and scale-out groups. I have a blog post coming up today on the topic with my full set of thoughts. The short version is, “Mostly not bad, though losing scale-out groups sucks.”