Azure Data Lake U-SQL October 2016 Updates: Deprecations turn into errors, sampling is live, sharing catalog objects across ADLA accounts, outputting headers and more!

We seem to be just cranking out new stuff :). Here are the October 2016 Updates for Azure Data Lake U-SQL!

The main take away is that the October refresh has now removed the old deprecated syntax of the items we have announced over the last couple of release notes!

Thanks for those who volunteered to test the new version of more scalable file set. Please contact us if you want to try it and help us validate it.

Here is the list of topics with links to the detailed release notes:

• Pending and Upcoming Deprecations
  • CREATE/DROP CREDENTIAL DDL is being deprecated
• Breaking Changes
  • Previously announced deprecation items are now removed
  • Introduction of a 4GB limit on .gz files
• Major U-SQL Bug Fixes, Performance and Scale Improvements
  • Fixing some misbehaving U-SQL quoted identifiers
  • Input File Set scales orders of magnitudes better (requires opt-in)
• New U-SQL capabilities
  • U-SQL sampling capabilities are now enabled by default
  • Catalogs can be shared among ADLA accounts as long as they share their primary ADLS storage
  • Built-in Extractors and Outputters support numeric and literal serialization and parsing of char datatypes
  • The built-in Outputters provide option to output column names as header
  • Scalar variables in DECLARE now allow inferring the variable's type

If you want to use the following preview capabilities, please request access by contacting us.

• U-SQL is starting to increase the limit on files in file set extractors

You can find more details with examples in the October release notes (or by clicking on the items above) on our GitHub site, where you also can find our previous release notes.