Microsoft has released SQL Server 2012 to manufacturing, but as is usual, the product is already in use in a lot of places. The software giant also said it would release an additional limited preview of an Apache Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure before mid-year. When I saw the word “Hadoop”, I said, “Bless you” and then ran off to Wikipedia to catch up on my geek-ese. A limited preview of the Hadoop-based service was released in December. There is a bunch of data warehousing stuff coming out with the general availability of SQL Server 2010 on April 1. Call for details.