Azure updates
Get the latest updates on Azure products and features to meet your cloud investment needs. Subscribe to notifications to stay informed.
RSS feedNovember 2019
UTF-8 support for Azure SQL Database is now available
UTF-8 support is now generally available for Azure SQL Database, allowing more options to companies extending their businesses to a global scale, where the requirements of providing global multilingual database applications and services is critical to meet customer demands and specific market regulations.
New PowerApps and Azure SQL Database integration experience in Azure portal
Now in preview, the Azure SQL Database experience in the Azure portal offers an entry point to create an app with PowerApps that is automatically connected to a table in a given database. Quickly create low-code, robust user experiences for any device using data from your SQL Database tables.
New Stream Analytics and Azure SQL Database integration experience in Azure portal
Stream real-time data into a SQL Database table directly from the Azure portal using Azure Stream Analytics (now in preview).
Azure SQL Database serverless is now generally available
Azure SQL Database serverless is a new compute tier that optimizes price-performance and simplifies performance management for databases with intermittent, unpredictable usage. Serverless automatically scales compute for single databases based on workload demand and bills for compute used per second.
SQL Server 2019 is now generally available
Microsoft SQL Server 2019 is now generally available for purchase.
October 2019
Azure Data Share—Support for sharing data from Azure SQL and SQL Data Warehouse
Azure Data Share service has added support for snapshot-based sharing from Azure SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse. It is now possible to share both structured data (from Azure SQL and SQL DW) and unstructured data (from Azure Data Lake Store and Blob storage) with centralised management and governance.
Private Link for Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse is now in preview
Private Link enables you to connect to Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse via a private endpoint.
September 2019
Auto-failover for managed instances in Azure SQL Database is now available
Now generally available, auto-failover groups enable business continuity after a catastrophic failure or other unplanned event by creating and managing a geographically redundant copy of a managed instance.
Azure Private Link is now available in preview
Target availability: Q3 2019
Connect to services in your Azure virtual networks more securely and privately with Azure Private Link, now available in preview.
Monthly payment options are now available for Azure reservations
Lower your upfront payment by selecting monthly payment options—at no additional cost—when purchasing Azure reservations.
Azure SQL Database—Instance pools are now in preview
Instance pools is a new managed instance option that provides a convenient and cost-effective way to migrate smaller instances to the cloud at scale, reducing or eliminating the extra work of consolidating less compute-intensive workloads.
August 2019
Azure SQL provides a unified management experience
Azure SQL is a modern SQL platform that serves developers and enterprises by offering a rich selection of deployment options, powered by an industry leading SQL Server engine.
SQL data discovery and classification for Azure SQL Database is now available
SQL data discovery and classification, which provides advanced capabilities built into Azure SQL Database for discovering, classifying, labeling, and protecting sensitive data, is now available.
Update to Azure SQL Database serverless increases compute scale limits by 4x
We are now announcing the max vcore limit has increased by 4x to 16 vcores and provides greater compute scaling headroom for serverless databases with more demanding workloads.
July 2019
Managed Instance enhances security with network traffic containment within Azure cloud
The network traffic of Azure SQL Database managed instance is now contained within Azure cloud by default. This update enhances the security and prevents exfiltration of data via Internet.
SQL Server CTP 3.2 big data cluster is now in preview
Big data clusters, one of the hero features for SQL Server 2019, is now available in preview. It combines SQL Server with Apache Spark and Hadoop Distributed File System for a unified data platform that enables analytics and AI over all data, relational and non-relational.
Introducing UTF-8 support for Azure SQL Database
Support for the widely used UTF-8 character encoding is now available as preview in Azure SQL Database, as a database-level or column-level default encoding for Unicode string data.
Azure SQL Database published the first in the industry business continuity SLA for a relational database service
Azure SQL database service has updated its service level agreement (SLA) offering guarantees for common disaster recovery metrics.
Update to Azure SQL Database serverless provides even greater price optimisation
The minimum configurable auto-pause delay has decreased to 1 hour providing even greater price optimisation opportunities for serverless databases.
Azure Cosmos DB ExpressRoute BGP Community now available
We are now announcing the addition of the Azure Cosmos DB community on ExpressRoute, which will allow for regional advertisements of Azure Cosmos DB.
Azure at Microsoft Ignite
Read the Azure blog for latest news and announcements.
BlogTell us what you think of Azure and what you want to see in the future.
Provide feedbackAzure is available in more regions than any other cloud provider.
Check product availability in your region