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Announcing GA of 128 vCore provisioned compute size on Azure SQL Standard-series (Gen5)

scott_kim's avatar
scott_kim
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Nov 30, 2022

We are excited to announce the GA release of 128 vCore provisioned compute size for Azure SQL Standard-series (Gen5) General Purpose and Business Critical databases and elastic pools. Enabling customer demands for increased scalability, Standard-series (Gen5) provisioned databases and elastic pools can now scale to 128 vCores and 625 GB of memory, beyond the previous max of 80 vCores and 415GB of memory. 

  

What are the benefits of 128 vCore compute size? 

  • 128 vCore compute sizes run on latest Intel Xeon Platinum 8370C (Icelake) and AMD EPYC™ 7763v (Milan) chipsets. More cores improve workload throughput, and newer chipsets improve single core performance. 
  • For Business Critical databases and elastic pools, max data IOPS is the highest available in any Azure SQL compute size, at 327,680 and 409,600 IOPS respectively. 
  • Max concurrent workers for General Purpose and Business Critical databases and pools increases to 12,800 and 13,440 respectively. 

 

Using the 128 vCore compute size is simple 

Customers can create a new database and elastic pool, or scale up an existing Azure SQL database or elastic pool to take advantage of 128 vCore compute size. 

  

Current limitations to be noted: 

  • Premium-series (including memory optimized) is only supported in the following initial regions at the moment but regional availability will continue to improve over the coming months.

    • Australia East (including Zone redundancy)
    • Australia SouthEast (including Zone redundancy)
    • Brazil South
    • Canada Central (including Zone redundancy)
    • Central US (including Zone redundancy)
    • Central India
    • South India
    • East Asia
    • East US (including Zone redundancy)
    • East US2
    • France Central
    • Germany West Central
    • Japan East
    • Japan West
    • Northcentral US
    • North Europe (including Zone redundancy)
    • Southeast Asia
    • Southcentral US
    • Switzerland North
    • UK South (including Zone redundancy)
    • West Europe (including Zone redundancy)
    • West Central US
    • West US
    • West US 2 (including Zone redundancy)
    • West US 3 (including Zone redundancy)
  • Zone redundancy for 128 vCores compute size is limited to a few regions as noted above, but expected to be more widely available over the coming months.
  • Azure SQL Database maintenance window is supported in most of the regions but expected to be more widely available over the coming months. 

 

Updated Feb 28, 2024
Version 9.0

4 Comments

  • Hi Johannes_Vink - I am assuming you are referring to a General Purpose database with 128 cores. IOPS did increase compared to an 80-core database, from 12,800 to 16,000 (see resource limits documentation). Log rate remains at 50 MB/s, just like for all General Purpose databases with cores in the 12-80 range.

     

    It is true that for many SQL workloads a demand for 128 cores would be coupled with a demand for much higher log rate. But there are exceptions, such as mostly or exclusively read-only workloads that are CPU-bound or memory-bound. While such workloads are less common, we do have customers successfully using General Purpose databases with a large number of cores. This lets them achieve significant cost savings compared to similarly sized Business Critical databases with higher IOPS and log rate.

  • Johannes_Vink's avatar
    Johannes_Vink
    Brass Contributor

    As far as I can see there are no updates on the IOPS and lograte? Because a 128 vcore database with a 50 MBps lograte is not really... in balance.

  • GlennAlanBerry's avatar
    GlennAlanBerry
    Copper Contributor

    You have a typo in the second paragraph, where it should be Intel Xeon Platinum 8370C (Icelake) rather than Intel Xeon Platinum 8307C (Icelake).