---
title: What is the storage pool?
titleSuffix: SQL Server big data clusters
description: This article describes the storage pool in a SQL Server 2019 big data cluster.
author: MikeRayMSFT 
ms.author: mikeray
ms.reviewer: mihaelab
ms.date: 08/21/2019
ms.topic: conceptual
ms.prod: sql
ms.technology: big-data-cluster
---

# What is the storage pool ([!INCLUDE[big-data-clusters-2019](../includes/ssbigdataclusters-ss-nover.md)])?

[!INCLUDE[tsql-appliesto-ssver15-xxxx-xxxx-xxx](../includes/tsql-appliesto-ssver15-xxxx-xxxx-xxx.md)]

This article describes the role of the *SQL Server storage pool* in a [!INCLUDE[big-data-clusters-2019](../includes/ssbigdataclusters-ver15.md)]. The following sections describe the architecture and functionality of a SQL storage pool.

## Storage pool architecture

The storage pool consists of storage nodes comprised of SQL Server on Linux, Spark, and HDFS. All the storage nodes in a SQL big data cluster are members of an HDFS cluster.

![Storage pool architecture](media/concept-storage-pool/scale-big-data-on-demand.png)

## Responsibilities

Storage nodes are responsible for:

- Data ingestion through Spark.
- Data storage in HDFS (Parquet and delimited text format). HDFS also provides data persistency, as HDFS data is spread across all the storage nodes in the SQL big data cluster.
- Data access through HDFS and SQL Server endpoints.

## Next steps

To learn more about the [!INCLUDE[big-data-clusters-2019](../includes/ssbigdataclusters-ss-nover.md)], see the following resources:

- [What are [!INCLUDE[big-data-clusters-2019](../includes/ssbigdataclusters-ver15.md)]?](big-data-cluster-overview.md)
- [Workshop: Microsoft [!INCLUDE[big-data-clusters-2019](../includes/ssbigdataclusters-ss-nover.md)] Architecture](https://github.com/Microsoft/sqlworkshops/tree/master/sqlserver2019bigdataclusters)