I can’t believe it’s already been a year since BDCs went GA (general availability). Time sure does fly by!
It was a year ago today when SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters went into General Distribution Release 1 (GDR1). Prior to Nov 4th, 2019, I was becoming familiar with BDCs by taking part of the “private preview” program. Things were a little tough back then because Azure Data Studio’s BDC deployment wizard was a little “rough around the edges” and so the majority of my initial BDC deployments were via the azdata command line. Definitely a learning curve for me. Over the following year, Big Data Clusters went through 8 CUs, (minus CU7). The release of CU5 back in June of 2020 was a huge effort by Microsoft. In CU5, Big Data Clusters could be deployed on Red Hat Openshift (4.3) and you can deploy multiple BDCs in a single Active Directory Domain (prior to CU5, you could only deploy one BDC per Active Directory Domain).
The most recent CU8 introduces encryption at rest for Compute pool and Storage pool. TDE is enabled by default in SQL instances in the Compute and Storage pool. HDFS encryption zones in the Storage pool are enabled. You can read more about CU8 encryption at rest here. If you want to read more about Transparent Encryption in HDFS, you can do so here.
A big Happy 1st Birthday to BDCs and a huge congratulations to the BDC team for their hard work! I’m eager to see how BDCs evolve over the coming year!