It was an amazing week at the PASS Data Community Summit 2024 in Seattle, Washington. Microsoft made several announcement for Azure SQL and tools showing continued innovation for our customers.

SSMS 21

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is hands-down the most popular tool in the world for using SQL Server and Azure SQL. Microsoft is now doubling-down its investment of SSMS with the public preview of a new version called SSMS 21. With a brand new look based on the latest Visual Studio shell, SSMS 21 provides a fresh new user interface, new installer/update experience, and many other new features including dark mode. Yes, dark mode is here for SSMS! SSMS 21 public preview is available to download today at https://learn.microsoft.com/sql/ssms/install/install.

In addition, we announced and demonstrated a new Copilot experience within SSMS that is available for a private preview. Sign-up today to try it out at https://aka.ms/smsinterest.

Azure SQL Managed Instance

We also announced an update to two new capabilities for Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Bi-directional (Online) Disaster Recovery with link feature

We announced the preview for this feature some time ago but I’m excited to see this land as now generally available. Looking for a managed disaster recovery solution? With the Link feature for Managed Instance, you can easily connect your SQL Server 2022 instance with Azure SQL Managed Instance to sync your database. Then any committed logged changes will be sent to the Managed Instance automatically. We use a Distributed Availability Group (DAG) behind the scenes.

If a disaster should occur, you can failover to the Managed Instance as your primary server. And when you have your SQL Server 2022 instance back up and running, you can resync it and fallback to SQL Server, hence the term bi-directional. You can also manually switch roles from SQL Server 2022 to Managed instance and back at any time. Furthermore, you can declare your Managed Instance as a disaster recovery site which allows you to save costs provided you haven’t switched to use it as a primary. What I like about this feature is that the Managed Instance is always available, hence the term managed disaster recovery.

Learn more by reading this blog post from the Managed Instance team at Online disaster recovery between SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL Managed Instance is now GA | Microsoft Community Hub

Next-gen General Purpose Service Tier

This is a new General Purpose service tier option we announced in preview earlier this year. We have refreshed the preview experience as part of our announcements. The Next-Gen General Purpose service tier provides new capabilities for Managed Instance to help you optimize, customize, and save costs. This includes:

• Support for 500 databases to help you consolidate instances
• Support for up to 128 vCores, 870GB of memory, and 32TB of storage
• The ability to control your I/O performance (through IOPS) independently of compute.

Learn more by reading this blog post at https://aka.ms/mi-next-gen-gp-blog.

Azure SQL Database

We also announced new features and updates to capabilities for Azure SQL Database for AI applications and database scale. This includes the following:

Native vector support

GenAI applications often use vectors to perform similarity searches using AI models. Azure SQL Database now supports in public preview vectors inside the engine itself through a native vector data and functions like vector_distance(). You can now combine this capability with REST API support through sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint to build a RAG pattern application inside SQL.

Want to get started and give AI a spin with Azure SQL? Check out our blog which includes details and example applications and data at Exciting Announcement: Public Preview of Native Vector Support in Azure SQL Database! - Azure SQL Devs’ Corner

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale enhancements

Hyperscale has become a popular deployment option for Azure SQL Databases, especially with our price reduction we announced in November of 2023.

We announced several enhancements and updates to features at the PASS Summit including:

• General Availability of Hyperscale Elastic Pools
• An increase for the maximum database size to 128TB
• Higher transaction log rate support up to 150 MiB/s
• Continuous priming of replicas to accelerate performance on failover

Check out our blog to get all the details at Announcing enhancements to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale | Microsoft Community Hub

Serverless ​enhancements

General Purpose service tier deployments using Serverless are so powerful since they provide auto scaling. But they can also save costs with a feature called auto-pause. When you are using the service, you pay at minimum the lower range of your serverless scale. If you have auto-pause enabled, after a period of inactivity, we will pause your database and you are not charged for any compute. Once you connect again to the database, we start it up, and you resume normal charge rates. It has been a very popular choice especially for developers just starting with Azure SQL Database. However, the biggest feedback we received is that lowest number to detect an idle database was one hour. With our new enhancement you can now choose a more granular number even down to 15 minutes. Learn more about serverless databases at https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/azure-sql/database/serverless-tier-overview.

It is exciting to see our team continue to innovate for both Azure SQL and tools that impacts very SQL user. Stay tuned for more announcements, updates, and enhancements for SQL, ground to cloud.

Bob Ward

Microsoft