Microsoft has taken some big steps towards ensuring that the Azure SQL Database is nearing parity with SQL Server. The company has added functionality to enable users to migrate more applications to the cloud, as well as run bigger databases on it.
Shattering through the 4TB limit on database sizes that was previously in place.
The company announced these changes at the PASS Summit this week, an event for database administrators and developers.
In terms of improvements that are coming to Microsoft database products, we have migration support to Azure SQL Database, Apache Kafka Support on Azure Event Hubs and Azure SQL Data Warehouse improvements.
Yet another preview of the coming SQL Server 2019 product is also in the mix.
One welcome news is the unveiling of a Hyperscale service tier that supports databases with up to 100TB of data. An Accelerated Database Recovery feature is also built in to speed up the process of recovering databases after a system failure.
Azure SQL Database are also now able to handle older applications that BDO run on Microsoft’s SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.
On top of that, Azure SQL Database Managed Instances now aim to reduce the friction on cloud migrations that existing users encounter. SQL Server applications can now be moved to a Managed Instance environment without any changes.
Additionally, the high-end Managed Instance Business Critical Version enables users to run their most mission critical SQL Server workloads on the Azure cloud platform.
And finally, Azure Monitor now has a Diagnostic Logs capability that can be configured to show historical query performance troubleshooting. It is also much more capable than the current Dynamic Management Views approach that has a limit of 10,000 rows.
A figure that can easily be exceeded for intensive enterprise data warehouse workloads that have a heavy query activity.
