G’day,

Recently I’ve become quite interested in the latest incarnation of Azure SQL Database.

For those that are unaware of some of the latest developments of this product, there was a new preview portal opened up towards the end of 2014.

This latest offering – know as version 12 (V12) – brought a lot of the common TSQL features to Azure SQL Database. This effectively narrows the gap between on prem versions of the database engine and Azure SQL Database. I would expect this gap to close to an even greater degree going forward from here.

CLR is among the new features, as are a whole new range of supported DMVs.

Migration of On Prem databases have also become easier with the addition of several migration alternatives.

The SQL Server Management Studio tools have been enhanced for better support of Azure SQL Database. If you’d like to experiment with these make sure you have the 2014 edition of SSMS and apply Cumulative Update 5 (CU5).

To find out more about the migration paths and the tools to implement them you can download an ebook that that has been put together by the Azure team

The full blog post can be found here

I think it would be pretty prudent to start looking as Azure SQL Database, as it seems to have come of age with the latest updates and will surely only get better from this point onwards.

Have a great day.

Cheers

Martin.