Data Exposed News Update
Read the 2024 recap of all the Azure SQL and SQL Server news this year or catch the live episode! If you missed the episode, you can find them all at https://aka.ms/AzureSQLYT. This was a special episode because it was live streamed from the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle. I had the honor to speak to some of the SQL leaders at Microsoft.
You can read this blog to get all the updates and references mentioned in the show. Without further ado, here’s the 2024 Year in Review:
Azure SQL Database
- Elastic pools for Hyperscale are now GA
- Azure SQL Database free ‘forever’ database (details)
- Copilot in Azure SQL Database (preview)
- Natural language to SQL in the portal Query Editor (preview)
- Serverless for Hyperscale (GA)
- 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.
- Guidance on how to migrate from Amazon QLDB to ledger tables in Azure SQL Database
- Lower auto-pause delay minimums for serverless databases (now 15 minutes!) (GA)
- Simplified subscription limits
- Maintenance window support for Hyperscale named replica
- Shrink for Hyperscale (preview)
- dbcompat 160 as default for new databases (GA)
- Enhanced time-based audit log filtering with fn_get_audit_file_v2
- UNISTR and || operators to escape Unicode characters and combine characters/binary strings (preview)
- License-free standby replica (GA)
- Availability metric in the portal (preview)
- Elastic jobs (GA)
- Public preview: Label-based access control for Azure SQL Database using Microsoft Purview policies
- Advance Maintenance Notifications (GA)
- Maintenance window support for Hyperscale elastic pools (preview)
- Mirroring Azure SQL Database to Microsoft Fabric (preview)
- Server Audit redesign worldwide availability
- Hyperscale PASS announcements: Max size to 128 TB (GA), log rate increase to 150 mbps (preview), continuous priming (preview)
- Data virtualization support (Polybase!) (preview)
AI
- Native vector type and functions are in preview in SQL DB and SQL MI
- SQL Server and Azure SQL can work for hybrid search with Azure AI services or frameworks like LangChain and Semantic Kernel.
- Azure AI Search works with all deployment options for SQL.
- A bunch of really cool samples and blogs!
- Similarity search with FAISS and Azure SQL
Tools and developer
- Data API Builder (GA) (including in-memory caching)
- SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 20 (GA) was released earlier this year, and the upcoming release of SSMS 21 Preview 1 was just announced, which will include many exciting capabilities. Erin Stellato has been collecting feedback through many forums, including blogs. Read the release blog here.
- SSMS 21 copilot (private preview)
- Preview release of SDK-style SQL projects in Visual Studio 2022
- SSDT for ARM64 in Visual Studio (preview)
- MSSQL Extension for VS Code v1.25.0: Rich UI features (Preview).
- Dev Container for Data API Builder (DAB) and SQL Server came out: https://aka.ms/try-dab
- Dev Container templates for Azure SQL Database (Demo)
- Use the debugger in SSDT
- New JSON data type (preview) for Azure SQL DB and SQL MI
- RegEx in Azure SQL Database (private preview)
- Several Microsoft.Data.SqlClient versions were released including a 6.0 preview
- JDBC driver updates and hotfixes
- System.Data.SqlClient was deprecated
- ODBC Driver 18.4
- Hotfix for OLE DB driver
- SqlPackage and DacFx updates
- Azure SQL trigger (GA)
- Database watcher for Azure SQL (preview)
Azure SQL Managed Instance
- 12-month free Azure SQL Managed Instance
- Instance pools public preview refresh
- The next generation of General Purpose Managed Instance (preview)
- Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose (GP) instances now have zone-redundant configuration available as an option (preview), billing began as well
- Premium-series memory optimized hardware is now available in all regions
- Premium-series memory optimized business critical, 16TB of storage is now available
- Business critical gives more granularity over the number of vCores
- 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 Azure tenant
- Authenticate with Microsoft Entra ID using windows principals metadata (preview)
- Advance Notifications for planned maintenance (GA)
- Update Policy configuration of Managed Instance (GA)
- Native JSON data type support (preview)
- Online disaster recovery (DR) GA between SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL Managed Instance
- External REST Endpoint Invocation for Managed Instance (private preview)
- Vector support (private preview)
- Regular Expressions (private preview)
SQL Server on Azure VMs
- Provision Premium SSD v2 Storage within the Azure portal (preview)
- Automated Patching Retirement and replacement with Azure Update Manager, which also went GA earlier this year
- New I/O analysis and best practices tabs in portal (preview)
- Place your SQL Server workloads on an Azure Elastic SAN for improved performance, throughput, and cost (GA)
- Deploy your SQL Server failover cluster instance (FCI) by using an Azure Elastic SAN (preview)
- New memory and storage optimized Mbsv3 size series (GA)
- New compute optimized Azure FXv2 series (preview)
SQL Server on Linux
- AD utility, adutil, is available on RHEL 9 and Ubuntu 22.04
- Sample for SQL Server on Linux Azure VM and Azure AI Search
- Always On Availability Group on AKS with DH2i’s DxOperator and Rancher by SUSE
- Enabling Azure Key vault support for SQL Server on Linux
Azure Arc enabled SQL Server
- Azure SQL migration assessment support in portal for Azure Arc enabled SQL Server (preview)
- Extended Security Updates for SQL Server 2014 are available through Arc
- Move resources across resource groups and subscription (GA)
- Inventory of availability groups is now GA
- Inventory of failover cluster instances is now GA
- Manage automated backups at the instance and database level (preview)
- Inventory of SQL Server Services (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, and PBIRS) is now in public preview
SQL Server
- There have been several CUs for SQL Server various versions, including several security updates.
- Updates for SCOM Management Packs for SQL Server, RS, AS (7.6.0.0)
- SQL Server 2014 reached end of support on July 9, 2024.
- A ton of AI samples with SQL
- Retirement of SQL Server Stretch Database
- SQL Server 2022 is EAL 2 Common Criteria certified
Migrations
- Migrate Arc enabled SQL Servers with Azure Arc enabled migrations experience (Private Preview)
- Price and performance optimized Next-gen Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose service tier is now available as a migration recommendation
- Simplify you Azure SQL migration journey with a single click SHIR configuration
- Migrate larger scale Oracle databases to Azure SQL using Azure Database Migration Service in SSMA 10
- Migrate large scale DB2 databases to Azure SQL using Azure Data Factory in SSMA 9.5
- Improve your SQL migration success rate with early validations for login migrations with Azure SQL Migration extension in Azure Data Studio
- Accelerate your SQL migration journey by provisioning targets using the ARM templates generated by Azure SQL Migration extension in Azure Data Studio
Fabric and Power BI
Ignite
Microsoft Ignite is just two weeks away. I promise you we have some exciting announcements planned for there as well. Please be sure to follow along and check back on the blog site updates!
Data Exposed
We released so many episodes of Data Exposed this year (around 60!). It’s such an honor to get to learn and share about all the new and exciting things the team is working on, and stories from MVPs and customers. Thank you READER and VIEWER for supporting the show by following along!
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 X to get the latest updates on everything, @AzureSQL.
We hope to see you next YEAR, on Data Exposed :-)
--Anna and Marisa
Updated Nov 06, 2024
Version 1.0
Anna Hoffman
Microsoft
Microsoft
