Preview of long-term backup retention in SQL Database gets an update

The preview of long-term backup retention in Azure SQL Database, announced in October 2016, has been updated with a set of major enhancements based on customer feedback:

• More regional support. Long-term retention will be supported in all Azure regions and national clouds.
• More flexible backup policies. You can customize the frequency of long-term backups for each database. Policies cover weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, with specific week-within-a-year backups.
• Management of individual backups. You can delete backups that are not critical for compliance.
• Streamlined configuration. There's no need to provision a separate backup service vault.

For more information, see the blog post.