azure-sqldw

I just got approved for the Azure SQL Data Warehouse Preview, and just finished "provisioning" my new server and database. I followed a link to a 'Getting Started' page from Microsoft ( Get started: Connect ... ), and read that the two best (only?) ways of querying the database were through sqlcmd and Visual Studio 2013. I ignored this advice first, and fired up SSMS, connected to the database, and then tried to open a new query window. I immediately received the following error: 'Unable to apply connection settings. The detailed error message is: 'NoCount' is not a recognized option.' After

Using CTAS we can leverage the parallelism that Polybase provides to load data into a new table in a highly scalable and performant way. Is there a way to use a similar approach to load data into an existing table? The table might even be empty. Creating an external table and using INSERT INTO ... SELECT * FROM ... - I would assume that this goes through the head node and is therefore not in parallel? I know that I could also drop the table and use CTAS to recreate it but then I have to deal with all the metadata again (column names, data types, distributions, ...). You could use partition

We are working to port existing applications to Azure SQL Data Warehouse. In order to better understand the performance/workload management characteristics/capabilities of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, I have set up what I consider a very simple test. I loaded a static table, our business's calendar, containing about 20k rows (i.e., very small for a parallel data warehouse). I then generated all the possible queries of that single table using a pattern like: SELECT current_timestamp,COUNT(1) FROM ( SELECT C1, ..., Cn , COUNT(1) AS _A_ROW_COUNT FROM schema.view_to_table GROUP BY C1, ..., Cn) DER