As previously announced in January, the latest SQL Database service version (V12) began a staged general availability (GA) roll out around the world—starting in Europe, then across the United States. Today, we are excited to announce general availability for this service version across Azure regions in Asia. Additionally, we’re significantly improving our disaster recovery objectives for all databases on this latest service version (V12) by as much as 360x. Together these investments further make Azure SQL Database a clear choice to cloud-based business-critical workloads and an easy migration target for on-premises database applications.

General availability of the latest service version in Asia
Now generally available in Asia, this service version introduces near-complete SQL Server engine compatibility, greater support for larger databases, a new S3 performance level, and 25 percent more Premium performance for the same cost. For customers looking to migrate existing SQL Server applications to Azure and reduce hardware costs and tax on IT, these investments significantly help streamline those migration efforts.

All new subscriptions and their subsequent databases created in the generally available regions will use the new service architecture and have access to the latest features. Customers with existing servers and databases in generally available regions may elect to upgrade and/or move their Basic, Standard, or Premium databases to the new V12 service architecture to utilize these new features in production. General availability pricing will take effect for all generally available V12 regions on April 1, 2015.
Significant improvement in disaster recovery objectives

With the latest service version (V12) in all regions, we’re significantly improving our recovery point objective (RPO) and estimated recovery time (ERT) by as much as 360x. RPO is the amount of most recent data changes (time interval) the application could lose after recovery. ERT is the estimated duration for the database to be fully functional after a restore/failover request.

Learn more about the latest service version for Azure SQL Database (V12) by visiting latest version for SQL Database (V12) documentation page.

We are excited about this service architecture and the functionality it enables us to deliver to you! We’re dedicated to pushing the boundaries on the value database-as-a-service can deliver to customers who are looking to bet their business on the cloud while reducing hardware costs and tax on IT.