Microsoft is celebrating. You have just officially released your SQL Server 2022 with Outstanding best in terms of security and performancein addition to including several functionalities compatible with Azure, all “a milestone in the more than 30 years of history of SQL Server”, as highlighted by the technology giant.
SQL Server 2022 connections to Azure, including Azure Synapse Link and Microsoft Purview, give your customers the power to drive deeper insights, predictions, and governance from their data at scale. In addition, the fact of integrating it with Azure also includes the managed disaster recovery to Azure SQL Managed Instance, along with near real-time analytics. This allows database administrators to manage their data states with greater flexibility and minimal impact to the end user.
Why Microsoft focuses on Azure
With a more focused focus on the cloud and Microsoft Azure in particular, some may believe that SQL Server 2022 is only suitable for current Azure users but it is not. It is just a company strategy for companies and professionals to switch to Azure. Or what is the same: give all users the benefits of the cloud without having to migrate.
Beyond Azure, SQL Server 2022 with Defender for SQL can monitor SQL Server workloads on-premises or in other clouds and warn of performance and security issues. There is also integration with Azure Storage, allowing you to connect to any S3-compatible storage provider, including AWS.
SQL Server is built from the same code base regardless of how it is used. Whether we use Azure in our own data center, in a virtual machine, in a container, at the edge with Azure SQL Edge subset features, through Azure SQL Managed Instance, or through database services, the new SQL Server features are present.
The Microsoft team is continually looking for solutions to bridge the gap between Azure and SQL Server on-premises users. One integration that was very popular in SQL Server 2022 preview was using Azure SQL Managed Instance for DR -disaster recovery- and is now very easy to configure with a wizard and without additional license cost.
Other novelties of SQL Server 2022 is that it can also be integrated with Azure Synapse, a service originally developed for Azure Cosmos DB, which continuously transmits the source of changes from a database to a data lake. Within the data lake, you can use your choice of cloud analytics tools to work with data without affecting the operational database or waiting for ETL batch jobs to run
SPLA, Microsoft cloud solution providers and OEMs will have access to this tool in January 2023. According to Microsoft, this second group represents less than 20% of the SQL Server business. For most organizations, SQL Server 2022 is already available as of yesterday, November 16, 2022. The new tool can be accessed directly from the Microsoft website.
