Azure Updates: Query Acceleration; VM guest patching; Satellite connectivity

Microsoft Ignite is right around the corner, bringing with it a slate of new announcement for Azure. But more than a week out from the event, Microsoft's in-house teams slowed the pace of some announcements, perhaps in a bid to drum up excitement for the event.

The Azure team touted the general availability of Query Acceleration for Data Lake Storage. Aimed at boosting both performance and cost management, the offering allows apps and frameworks to push down predicates and column projections, thereby applying them at the time data is first read. This is different than costs of filtering and process data commonly found with big data analytics frameworks like Spark and Hive.