Stretch Database is finally going away. It is being retired. It was deprecated on Nov 16, 2022, from SQL Server 2022. Effective Jul 9, 2024, the supporting Azure service is retired. I saw this in an announcement on Jul 3, though I hope anyone using this service has been seeing lots of reminders over the last couple of years. I know I'm getting MySQL retirement notices for one of my services and need to migrate some workloads this month.

If you tried this service, you might have realized that the pricing didn't make sense for most of us. If you hadn't tried it, it worked by moving some of the data in your tables into Azure, where it could be queried if needed. It was an interesting idea, though most of us would have wanted this to work between two SQL Server instances, not between SQL Server on-premises and Azure.

In any case, if you're on an older version of SQL Server, the recommendation is that you bring your data back on-premises. If you have SQL Server 2022, they recommend CETaS (Create External Table as Select), which lets you query data in Azure storage. This lets you put some data in text formats and query it as needed, reducing the use of expensive relational storage disks. Parquet is the recommended format here. There's also a weird mention of Fabric in the announcement, which doesn't seem to fit with the objective of the rest of article.

I haven't worked with this enough to know how well this performs or what patterns might fit here. I do know that reducing the queries from clients, especially SELECT * and unbounded queries across all your data helps. If your clients always want to query all data in a table, then nothing works well. Building systems that query hot data by default, and filter away from warm/cold data is always helpful. Having some good indexing is also important.

I don't know of anyone that uses Stretch Database, so I'm not sure how many people are affected here, but I hope they knew about this before Jul 9.