Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Azure SQL News Update: January 2022

Today Data Exposed goes live at 9AM PT on LearnTV. Every 4 weeks, we’ll do a News Update. We’ll include product updates, videos, blogs, etc. as well as upcoming events and things to look out for. If you missed the episode, you can find them all at https://aka.ms/AzureSQLYT.

 

You can read this blog to get all the updates and references mentioned in the show. Here’s the January 2022 update:

 

Product updates

Let’s start with Azure SQL Managed Instance. Right after Ignite, using distributed transactions (.NET and T-SQL) across multiple Azure SQL Managed Instances became generally available. This announcement helps with frictionless migrations and modern app development. In December, long-term retention for backups for up to 10 years became generally available, a capability much-anticipated since it’s been available in Azure SQL Database for a while. Also recently, service endpoint policies became available; Zoran Rilak came on the show to tell us all about it (docs and a demo).

 

For Azure SQL Database, the ability to configure backup storage redundancy to store backups on local, zone, or geo-redundant storage became generally available. Choice of location for your backup redundancy is important in giving you flexibility and control for availability or data sovereignty needs. For Azure SQL Hyperscale databases, SQL maintenance windows and advanced notifications are now in public preview for planned maintenance. Plus, for Hyperscale we just announced the public preview of support for auto-failover groups, and Emily Lisa came on the show to tell us about it!

 

Across Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database, in December we introduced outbound firewall rules to storage accounts as generally available. Outbound firewall rules enable you to limit network traffic from Azure SQL to a customer defined list of storage accounts.

 

Finally, across Azure SQL and SQL Server, in late November, we announced Azure SQL bindings for Azure Functions in public preview. With Azure SQL bindings, data can be input from a database to the function with an input binding and data can be output from the function to the database. Configuring these bindings is accomplished with a small number of parameters, including specification of the database query or table and the connection string.

 

Other database updates

Starting this year, I want to start including other database updates, from our open-source databases and Cosmos DB. Let’s see how it goes.

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Database for PostgreSQL-Hyperscale (Citus)

Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Azure Database for MySQL

Python SDK async IO support in public preview

 

Glowroot support for Cassandra API in general availability

New toolkit certifications generally available

 

PostgreSQL 14 support in general availability

Support for Citus 10.2 generally available

Flexible Server generally available

 

Flexible Server: Geo-redundant backup and restore in public preview

 

Single Server: Long-term retention generally available

 

Azure Stream Analytics jobs to write to Azure Database for PostgreSQL in public preview

Flexible Server generally available

 

Flexible Server: Terraform support is generally available

 

 

Videos

We continued to release new and exciting Azure SQL episodes this month. Here is the list, or you can just see the playlist we created with all the episodes!

  • Lior Kamrat: Azure Arc-enabled Data Services Directly Connected Mode Breakdown
  • [MVP Edition] Hamish Watson: KQL - The Next Query Language You Need to Learn
  • Pam Lahoud, Priya Shan: Azure SQL VM: Best Price-Performance with Ebdsv5 Series (Ep.6)
  • Pedro Lopes: Intelligent Query Processing in SQL Server 2022 (Ep.3)
  • Bob Ward: SQL Server 2022: The cloud-connected database (Ep.2)
  • [MVP Edition] Rob Sewell: From Nowt to Query in 10 minutes: Azure Arc–enabled data services SQL Managed Instance
  • Parikshit Savjani: Top 3 Reasons to Consider Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server
  • Henning Rauch: Azure Synapse Data Explorer for Log & Telemetry Management
  • Denzil Ribeiro: Data Loading Best Practices on Azure SQL Database
  • Bob Ward: Introduction to SQL Server 2022 (Ep.1)

We’ve also had some great Data Exposed Live sessions. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see them all and get notified when we stream. Here are some of the recent live streams.

  • Azure SQL & SQL Server 2022: Intelligent Database Futures
  • Azure SQL News Update: Year in Review
  • Welcome to SQL Server 2022 Live!

 

Blogs

As always, our team is busy writing blogs to share with you all. Blogs contain announcements, tips and tricks, deep dives, and more. Here’s the list I have of SQL-related topics you might want to check out.

 

Upcoming events

As always, there are a lot of events coming up. Here are a few to put on your calendar and register for from the Azure Data team:

2/25: Northern Virginia Data Platform MeetUp

2/27 – 3/4: Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas

3/8 -12: SQL Bits 2022

Plus find new, on-demand Data Exposed episodes released every Thursday at https://aka.ms/dataexposedyt

 

Featured Microsoft Learn Module

Learn with us! This month I highlighted the module: Introduction to Azure Arc-enabled data services (https://aka.ms/learnazurearcdata). In this module, you'll learn the fundamentals of hybrid computing and Azure Arc. You will also learn the basics of Azure Arc-enabled data services including the overall architecture. Then you will learn the capabilities of Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance and PostgreSQL Hyperscale.

 

Anna’s Pick of the Month

The year has just started, but you want to make sure you’re caught up on all the 2021 news. Last month, we did a news update containing all of the updates across Azure SQL, SQL Server, and Azure Arc data services in the year 2021. You can review it here: https://aka.ms/NewsUpdate2021. I hope you find it useful!

 

Until next time…

That’s it for now! Be sure to check back next month for the latest updates on LearnTV. We also release new episodes on Thursdays at 9AM PST and new #MVPTuesday episodes on the last Tuesday of every month at 9AM PST at aka.ms/DataExposedyt.

Having trouble keeping up? Be sure to follow us on twitter to get the latest updates on everything, @AzureSQL.

 

We hope to see you next time, on Data Exposed :)

--Anna and Marisa

Posted at https://sl.advdat.com/3nnm5Kx