Today at the annual PASS Summit conference, we announced a new preview of Azure SQL Database coming later this year that represents another major milestone for our database-as-a-service. With this preview, we continue our journey to bring industry-leading in-memory technologies to the cloud as well as unlock new functionality that makes it even easier to move SQL Server database applications to the cloud.

Primarily focused on unlocking the most popular T-SQL functions, this preview will help you work with heavier database workloads, improve monitoring and troubleshooting, and support more robust applications with support for key programmability functions while support for columnstore index queries will help improve performance for data mart-type analytics.

Full documentation and detailed enhancements will be published upon availability of the preview, however, key highlights are as follows:

• Easier management of large databases to support heavier workloads with parallel queries (Premium only), table partitioning, online indexing and worry-free large index rebuilds with 2GB size limit removed, and alter database command.
• Support for key programmability functions to drive more robust application design with CLR, T-SQL Windows functions, XML index, and change tracking.
• Drive breakthrough performance with support for In-memory columnstore queries (Premium only) for data mart and smaller analytic workloads.
• Improved monitoring and troubleshooting: Extended Events (XEvents) and visibility into over 100 new table views via an expanded set of Database Management Views (DMVs).

I am incredibly excited for you to try this preview later this year. These new preview capabilities will be offered as part of the new service tiers, which deliver an industry-leading SLA at 99.99% availability, larger database size, built-in data protection capabilities and predictable performance. Combine this with the Elastic Scale technologies that allow you to scale out to thousands of databases for processing 10s of terabytes of OLTP data, and the SQL Database service becomes a clear choice for any cloud-based mission critical application.

This new preview, combined with last week’s announcements of Azure Data Factory and Azure Stream Analytics and our full portfolio of data services, which also includes DocumentDB, Azure Search, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure HDInsight, help to round out a complete data platform that makes it easier for you to capture, transform, and analyze any data—using the tools, languages and frameworks you want in a trusted environment on-premises and in the cloud.

Stay tuned for more information!