Recently, we announced a number of Azure SQL Managed Instance improvements in Business Critical tier. In this article, we would like to highlight that the premium-series memory optimized hardware is now available in all Azure regions, up to 40 vCores!
What is new?
Having the latest and greatest hardware generation available for the Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical service tier can be crucial for the critical customer workloads. Until recently, premium-series memory optimized hardware generation was available only in a subset of Azure regions. Now you can have a SQL MI BC instance with premium-series memory optimized hardware in any Azure region up to 40 vCores.
This means that the new state for premium-series memory optimized hardware availability is:
Improve performance of your database workload with more memory per vCore
Increasing memory can improve the performance of applications and databases by reducing the need to read from disk and instead storing more data in memory, which is faster to access. You might want to consider upgrading to memory-optimized premium-series for several reasons:
- Buffering and Caching: More memory can be utilized for caching frequently accessed data or buffering I/O operations, leading to faster response times and improved overall system performance.
- Handling Larger Datasets: If the user is dealing with larger datasets or increasing workload demands, more memory can accommodate the additional data and processing requirements without experiencing slowdowns or performance bottlenecks.
- Concurrency and Scalability: Higher memory capacity can support more concurrent users or processes, allowing the system to handle increased workload and scale effectively without sacrificing performance.
- Complex Queries and Analytics: Memory-intensive operations such as complex queries, data analytics, and reporting often benefit from having more memory available to store intermediate results and perform calculations efficiently.
- In-Memory Processing: Some databases and applications offer in-memory processing capabilities, where data is stored and manipulated entirely in memory for faster processing. Increasing memory allows for more data to be processed in-memory, resulting in faster query execution and data manipulation.
How to upgrade your instance to premium-series memory optimized hardware
You can scale your existing managed instance from Azure portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI or ARM templates. You can also utilize ‘online scaling’ with minimal downtime. See Scale resources - Azure SQL Database & Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft Learn.
Summary
More memory for a managed instance can lead to improved performance, scalability, and efficiency in handling larger workloads, complex operations, and data processing tasks. This improvement in Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical makes premium-series memory optimized hardware available in all regions, up to 40 vCores.
If you're still new to Azure SQL Managed Instance, now is a great time to get started and take Azure SQL Managed Instance for a spin!
Next steps:
