Microsoft's SQL Server 2022 is All About Azure

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2022, the latest version of its database software, which originally launched more than 33 years ago. From a report: Microsoft describes this release as the "most Azure-enabled release of SQL Server yet" and with connections to Azure Synapse Link for enabling real-time analytics over the database, Azure Purview for data governance and disaster recovery with the help of Azure SQL Managed Instance, this release is, in many ways, the culmination of the cloud-connection groundwork the team started quite a few years ago. "From the very beginning, the vision [for SQL Server] really was about -- databases were very complex -- how do you make that extremely simple? And in many ways, I think that has been a key reason why it lasted for so long and how we've evolved it as well," Rohan Kumar, Microsoft's corporate VP for Azure Data, told me. "One of the big things that I think about with SQL Server 2022 is that we've made it completely cloud-connected to Azure." He noted that while the migration of on-prem workloads is happening, Microsoft's customers are all moving at very different speeds and some, for a multitude of reasons, may never move to the cloud at all. That, he argues, is why the company always bet on a hybrid approach, but it is also why a lot of customers started asking about how they could get the value of being in the cloud without actually having to move all of their data to it. "That was really the key thesis of why we invested in making this into a cloud release," Kumar said. A good example here is the new disaster recovery function that allows users to replicate their data in SQL Managed Instance on Azure and use that as a backup for their main on-premises SQL Server, which should make it easy to fail over to that when the main server goes down.

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