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Unstructured data, for lack of a more poetic phrase, exists. In fact, there's more of it now than at any time in history - the growth rate Forrester experts cite is 80% annually, and perhaps rising. All this year, analysts have been asking whether Microsoft would come to embrace unstructured data, or what some call "NoSQL databases." But by now, it's grown so large that it's encompassing Microsoft.

So amid today's stunning news that the company plans to integrate Hadoop support in Windows Server, even insofar as to consider adopting it as a role alongside Web server (IIS) and DNS server, there's this structured database management system whose roadmap to general availability was announced this morning at the PASS Summit in Seattle.

This week Microsoft announced its intentions to bring Hadoop to SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW). PDW was introduced last year and brought centralized data warehousing capabilities to SQL Server.

"As a first step, we will soon release a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of two new Hadoop connectors - one for SQL Server and one for PDW," the SQL Server Team blog says.

Microsoft has released a preview of two database products: the next SQL Server as well as a free trial of SQL Azure. The first is a chance to get your hands on pre-release code for the company's flagship offering in the database space; SQL Server 2008 R2 is the formal name for the newest iteration of the platform. SQL Azure is probably something more unfamiliar. It's a relational database built on its Azure platform for the cloud.