Microsoft Embraces Elephant of Open Source

It took more than three years, but Microsoft has finally learned to stop worrying and love Hadoop.

Hadoop — an open source platform for crunching epic amounts of a data across an army of dirt-cheap servers — underpins everything from Facebook and Twitter to Yahoo! and eBay, and it’s poised for use across the enterprise, with EMC, IBM, and Oracle pushing the platform onto corporate customers. But although Microsoft acquired a Hadoop pioneer as far back as the summer of 2008, its relationship with the platform has been uneasy at best, as the company continued to shed its traditional aversions to open source software.

Any aversion to Hadoop disappeared on Wednesday, when the company announced that it will integrate the platform with future versions of its relational database, SQL Server, and its platform cloud, Windows Azure, an online service for hosting and readily scaling applications...