Azure SQL—General availability updates for late-April 2023 

In late April 2023, the following updates and enhancements were made to Azure SQL and Azure SQL Managed Instance:  

Use the link feature for Azure SQL Managed Instance for hybrid connectivity with SQL Server 2016 and 2019. Use Azure without migrating, offload read-only and analytics workloads to Azure and use as the best minimum downtime migration solution.

SQL Managed Instance now supports CETAS (“Create External Table As Select”) functionality. This feature allows users to export data from local database tables into parquet and CSV files in Azure storage and creates external tables for easy querying of the exported data through data virtualization.