What’s new in SQL Server and Azure SQL: 2024 so far | Data Exposed News Update

[Anna Hoffman]

Read the 2024 recap of all the Azure SQL and SQL Server news this year so far or catch the live episode! If you missed the episode, you can find them all at https://aka.ms/AzureSQLYT. This one also features a special Ask Me Anything with product group members and was streamed live.

You can read this blog to get all the updates and references mentioned in the show (including the awesome speakers we had on). Since we did things a little differently this month, here’s the special update which contains the updates from the year so far:

SQL Server on Azure VMs

• Provision Premium SSD v2 Storage for SQL Server on Azure VMs within the Azure portal. Premium SSD v2 storage improves performance, reliability, and scalability while offering capacity (you can create a single disk with up to 64 TiB, 80K IOPS, and 1200 MB/s throughput). Learn more.

Azure SQL Managed Instance

• 12-month freemium
• Instance pools public preview refresh! Instance pools provide the unique capability to provision small, cost-effective 2-vCores instances within a pre-provisioned instance pool. This way, small instances can cost 50% less compared to non-pooled instances. Pooled instances also provision very fast (under 5 minutes).
• The next generation of general purpose is now in public preview – this includes significantly improved storage performance, doubled max instance storage (32TB) and support for more DBs per instance (500), plus the ability to configure IO performance separately from storage size via IOPS slider
• Premium-series memory optimized hardware is now available in all regions with up to 40 vCores. Additionally, for Premium-series memory optimized business critical, 16TB of storage is now available.
• Business critical giving you more granularity over the number of vCores, pay for what you need.
• Cross-subscription database copy and move has been updated to include support for online, cross-instance database copy and move operations across all instances under the same tenant.
• Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose instances now have zone-redundant configuration available as an option (preview).

Azure SQL Database

• Copilot in Azure SQL Database through two Azure portal experiences (natural language to SQL and Azure Copilot integration) is now in private preview. Learn about it and how to sign up here.
• Serverless is now generally available for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, enabling combined benefits of performance and scale for serverless and Hyperscale together. Note that the serverless capability today does not include auto-pause and resume, but we’re working on it! More here.
• Zone redundancy is now available to be enabled for Hyperscale – Named Replicas in Azure SQL Database (preview).
• Maintenance windows for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale elastic pools is now available in public preview.
• Azure SQL Database Hyperscale elastic pools is now available in public preview in Azure U.S. government regions.
• For all of Azure SQL Database, we now have advanced notifications for planned maintenance events.
• Mirroring SQLDB in Fabric is now in Public Preview, enabling you to get quicker time to insights with no ETL.

Updates across Azure SQL

• Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions is now generally available. We’ve seen a ton of adoption and use of the Azure SQL bindings in Azure Functions, and this addition is welcomed! The trigger uses SQL change tracking to monitor for changes and trigger a function when a row is created, updated, or deleted.
• Database watcher for Azure SQL (preview). This is exciting! Within a few minutes, you can set up database monitoring at scale for your Azure SQL resources. For those of you who remember SQL Insights, we took the feedback and iterated and innovated with this release. Not only do we centralize the data and visualize in a single view, but we enable you to take advantage of Azure Data Explorer and Real-Time Analytics in Fabric to do all the custom monitoring you could want.

Security

• Public preview: Label-based access control for Azure SQL Database using Microsoft Purview policies. Azure SQL Database now supports the ability to enforce label-based access control on columns with sensitive data that have been labeled with Microsoft Purview Information Protection (MIP) sensitivity labels, using MIP protection policies.

Migrations

• Public Preview: Schema Migration to Azure SQL DB target is now available in Azure Database Migration... With this feature users can migrate the schemas along with the data using Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) without having to use DACPAC or other tools.
• “As on premises” assessments available in Azure Migrate for SQL Server discovery and assessments. This option uses the source instance configuration to generate the target size recommendation in Azure SQL.
• Oracle At-scale discovery and assessment by Azure Migrate is now in Private preview to enable large scale oracle migrations. With this feature, users can discover multiple Oracle database instances at once and get them assessed for an Azure Data target including Azure SQL, Azure Postgres and Azure Oracle VMs. To sign-up for this feature please reach out to Microsoft Support.
• Single click setup for Self-hosted IR in the Azure Data Studio extension of DMS. This feature simplifies the user journey of Azure SQL Migration tooling configuration by automating download, install and configure steps of the Self-hosted IR (SHIR) agent of DMS service.

Arc-enabled SQL Server

• New support for a migration assessment experience for your Arc-enabled SQL Servers.

SQL Server

• There have been several CUs for SQL Server 2022, including a Security Update.
• Updates for SCOM Management Packs for SQL Server, RS, AS (7.4.0.0)

Tools and developer

Where would we be without all our tools and experiences! Across our suite, we have released all sorts of new capabilities that I cannot wait for you to try out (if you haven’t already). The one I want to call out is SSMS 20! Erin Stellato, leader of SSMS, has released several blogs on this topic (start here). The best way to stay up to date is with the release notes. Not including all of them, but a few to get you started. Find us on GitHub, social media, or the Azure Ideas forum to give us feedback.

• SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) release notes
• Azure Data Studio (ADS) release notes 1.48 now available!
• Go-sqlcmd release notes
• SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT in Visual Studio) release notes learn more about ARM64 support in the blog.
• SqlPackage release notes à new release with parquet support updates learn more in the blog.

One more related developer announcement is for the DevContainer for Data API Builder (DAB) and SQL Server. This makes it much easier to setup local development (uses Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Developer Edition). Get started at https://aka.ms/try-dab.  

Anna’s Pick of the Month

My pick of the month is Fabric! Last week, I got to attend the first ever #FabCon. I had so much fun learning about Fabric capabilities, engaging with the community, and of course talking about how SQL plays into all of it (and the things you all want to do!). If you’re interested in influencing the future of SQL and Fabric integrations (and have an NDA with Microsoft), would love to get your input on something we’re working on. Sign up: https://aka.ms/sqlfabinterest

Until next time…

That’s it for now! We release new episodes on Thursdays at 9AM PT and new #MVPTuesday episodes on the last Tuesday of every month at 9AM PT at aka.ms/DataExposedyt. Having trouble keeping up? Be sure to follow us on twitter to get the latest updates on everything, @AzureSQL.

We hope to see you next time, on Data Exposed :)

--Anna and Marisa