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RSS feedMarch 2020
Azure SQL Database managed instance now enforces TLS 1.2 on outbound connections
Target availability: Q1 2020
In January 2020 Microsoft enforced TLS 1.2 for intra-service traffic in all Azure services. For Azure SQL Database managed instance, this resulted in TLS 1.2 being enforced on outbound connections used for replication and linked server connections to SQL Server.
February 2020
New Azure SQL Database automatic tuning default settings—March 2020
Target availability: Q1 2020
In March 2020, Azure SQL Database will introduce new automatic tuning default settings designed to provide optimal database performance.
January 2020
Updating hardware generation in managed instance now available in Azure portal
Managed instance now provides the capability to update hardware generation from Gen4 to Gen5 from the pricing tier screen in the Azure portal.
December 2019
Service-aided subnet configuration for managed instance in Azure SQL Database is now available
To address customer security and manageability requirements, managed instance, a deployment capability of Azure SQL Database, is transitioning from a manual to service-aided subnet configuration.
Azure SQL Database managed instance meter PITRs name changes
Effective February 1, 2020, the meter names of Azure SQL Database managed instance point-in-time restore (PITR) backup will change.
Azure SQL Database Gen 4 hardware approaching end of life in 2020
Target retirement date: December 18, 2019
Azure SQL Database is beginning the decommissioning process of Gen 4 Intel E5-2673 v3 (Haswell)-based CPUs and is transitioning to Intel E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) 2.3 GHz and Intel SP8160 (Skylake) processors for all new deployments.
Easily monitor backup storage costs for Azure SQL databases and elastic pools
Easily monitor backup storage costs for your single databases and elastic pools directly from the Azure portal.
November 2019
Azure SQL Database—Extensions for index resumable online operations
Now in general availability, a new configuration option, PAUSED_RESUMABLE_INDEX_ABORT_DURATION_MINUTES, has been added to ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION (Transact-SQL) for resumable online index operations.
Azure Active Directory server principals (logins) for SQL managed instance
Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) server principals (also known as Azure AD logins) for managed instance are now in general availability.
New Azure SQL Database backup storage metrics are now generally available
New metrics are now available to monitor Azure SQL Database backup storage consumption.
Migrate SQL Server databases for Windows users to SQL managed instance
Support is now available in preview for T-SQL Data Definition Language (DDL) for Windows users and groups migrating from SQL Server databases to SQL managed instance with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication.
Azure SQL Database—Billing for managed instance backup storage is now in effect
Managed instance backup storage billing went into effect November 1, 2019. Backup storage is free of charge up to sizes equal to the size of the provisioned storage, while any additional GB is charged at a fixed amount depending on region.
Transparent data encryption with customer-managed keys for Azure SQL Database managed instance is now generally available
Transparent data encryption (TDE) with customer-managed keys for Azure SQL Database managed instance is now generally available.
Azure Private Link is now available in all regions
Azure Private Link, which provides private connectivity to Azure services, is now available in all regions.
New memory and compute optimized hardware options in Azure SQL Database
Now in preview, M-series and Fsv2-series are new hardware options in Azure SQL Database specialized for workloads requiring very high compute or memory scale, or very fast CPU speed.
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’s 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.
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