General availability: Read scale-out support for Azure SQL Database
Published date: March 29, 2019
Azure SQL Database's read scale-out support in the Premium and Business Critical service tiers is now generally available.
This capability redirects the read-only client connections to one of the automatically provisioned HA replicas and effectively doubles the compute capacity of the database or elastic pool at no additional charge. This is ideal for load balancing of complex analytical workloads without affecting the primary OLTP workload.
To learn more, see the read scale-out documentation.