Against the backdrop of rival Google LLC rolling out new infrastructure options for cloud customers, Microsoft Corp. today augmented the analytics capabilities of its Azure platform.

The company this morning launched a heavily upgraded version of the Azure SQL Data Warehouse service that features major speed improvements across the board. According to Microsoft, this includes an up to fivefold increase in query execution times. It credits the boost to a technology called adaptive caching.

The updated data warehouse runs on servers equipped with high-speed NVMe flash drives. As Microsoft detailed in a blog post, the adaptive cache can identify an organization’s most frequently used records and store them on the machines to enable rapid access. The fact that the information stays close to where the processing is done makes the speed boost all the more substantial, since requests don’t have to make a round trip to a remote storage environment.

Complementing the new cache is a set of scalability improvements. Microsoft said companies can now provision up to five times more computing power for their data warehouses than before, as well as keep a larger amount of data inside. To top it off, the service is now capable of running up to 128 queries at the same time during busy periods.

These enhancements should appeal most to Microsoft’s largest customers. The company’s rivals are also aggressively going after big accounts, with Google having made particularly big strides lately. At the end of March, for instance, the search giant inked a deal with Shopify Inc. to host the e-commerce powerhouse’s backend systems.

But despite Google’s recent gains, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft continue to lead the market by a significant margin in the first and second place, respectively. The upgrades to Azure SQL Data Warehouse could help further cement the company’s position, particularly in the key analytics category.

The new version of the service is available immediately, while the previous iteration is set to remain accessible as a separate product tier.

Image: Microsoft