Azure SQL News Update: October 2021

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Today and every Wednesday 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. We’ve included an iCal file, so you can add a reminder to tune in live to your calendar. 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 October 2021 update:

Product updates

Let’s start with some general availability announcements for Azure SQL Managed Instance. In early September, we announce a change in the instance delete flow for Azure SQL managed Instance. Without getting too into the details, Azure SQL Managed Instance contains a set of components hosted on a virtual cluster. With the new announcement, we are helping by automatically deleting the virtual cluster once the last managed instance in the cluster is automatically removed. To understand how we are making these decisions and how long it takes, check out the details here.

Also for Azure SQL Managed Instance, it is now available under the Azure Resource Terraform registry. We’ve introduced new resource creation language azurerm_sql_managed_databaseand azurerm_sql_managed_instance. Now you can use Terraform natively as opposed to using the ARM template workaround. More information here.

For Azure SQL Database, there are two general availability announcements: SQL Data Sync Private Link and new server roles. SQL Data Sync Private Link will enable you to create a secure connection between the sync service and your hub and member databases.

To support principle of least privilege efforts, the security team announced three new server roles that can be assigned to server logins, enabling customers to assign and delegate job functions for server-wide metadata access without admin privileges. Andreas Wolter came on the show to tell us more about it, you can read more here.

For Azure SQL PaaS services, we’ve added new functionality in preview that enables you to configure your differential backup frequency. Prior to this announcement, you had no choice, it was set to 12-24 hours and you might not know which is enabled. With the announcement, 12-hours is set by default, but you can change to a 24-hour frequency. The documentation does a great job of explaining the tradeoffs.

Last but certainly not least, Scalar UDF inlining (available already in SQL Server 2019), is now available for Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database. Pooja Kamath came on the show to tell us more about it and how to get started.

As far as external guests go, we were also joined by David Norman from https://prisma.io. We’re working on a guest blog with them, so you’ll want to watch this space!

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!

Alexandra Ciortea, Raymond Truong, Wenjing Wang: Migrating to SQL: How to find the right Azure SQL SKU for your SQL workloads (Ep. 8)
[MVP Edition] Javier Villegas: SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances in Azure
Bob Ward, Buck Woody: New Microsoft Learn Modules: Azure SQL IoT and Azure Arc-enabled data services
Claire Giordano: How to Use Citus to Shard Postgres, for Performance & Scale
Denzil Ribeiro: Using Query Store Hints to Optimize Memory Grants Improving Performance
David Pless: Azure SQL VM: Using PerfInsights to Evaluate Resource Health and Troubleshoot (Ep. 5)

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.

Deep Dive: Deploy IoT solutions with Azure SQL Database
Deep Dive: Modernize your Oracle workloads to Azure SQL
Ask the Experts: SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machine (Ep. 4)

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 this month. Here are a few to put on your calendar and register for from the Azure Data team:

10/21: The Hybrid Data Cloud Game Show with Portworx and Azure Arc (Pure Storage)

10/21: Cloud Day 2021
- Architecting modern cloud solutions to take advantage of database "scaleoutability", Davide Mauri

10/26: Dell PowerFlex Platform for SQL Server and Azure Arc

10/28: All Day DevOps 2021
- From Oops to Ops: Incident Response with Jupyter Notebooks, Julie Koesmarno

In addition to these upcoming events, here’s the schedule for Data Exposed Live:
10/13: Azure Data Factory Power Hour
10/27: Azure SQL Virtual Machines Reimagined Series (Ep.5)

Plus find new, on-demand Data Exposed episodes released every Thursday, 9AM PT at https://aka.ms/dataexposedyt

Featured Microsoft Learn Module

Learn with us! This month I highlighted the module: Architect full-stack applications and automate deployments with GitHub. In the language of your choice (Node.js, Python, or .NET), deploy an end-to-end solution to solve the real-world scenario of catching the bus. You'll learn how to architect a solution that uses Azure SQL Database, Azure Functions, Azure Static Web Apps, Logic Apps, Visual Studio Code, and GitHub Actions. This module is focused on using GitHub Actions with the previously listed services for CI/CD.

Anna’s Pick of the Month

My pick of the month is the new learning module on Microsoft Learn that Silvano Coriani and I recently published. In this module, learn how Azure SQL Database provides a price-performant backend for IoT applications. You'll also deploy a template that includes Azure SQL Database, Azure VMs, Azure Functions, and Power BI which simplifies deploying and configuring IoT solutions. I had a lot of fun learning and creating this module with Silvano, I hope you’ll check it out - https://aka.ms/azuresqliot.

Until next time…

That’s it for now! Be sure to check back next month for the latest updates, and tune into Data Exposed Live every Wednesday at 9AM PST 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. You can also download the iCal link with a recurring invite!

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

--Anna and Marisa

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