Comment by blyry

This is a great feature. We've been able to significantly extend the scope and usefulness of our on-prem SQL Cluster for analytics and reporting with PolyBase by building new transactional systems with cheaper postgres, doing ETLs of third-party data to delta tables in azure storage, and then federating access to them with PolyBase so that nobody in the business has to change how they actually query the data. I'm sure in another decade we'll be fully migrated to some cloud platform but for now, federating the queries is a huge win.