Today, we announced the general availability of SQL Server 2022, the most Azure-enabled release of SQL Server yet, with continued innovation across performance, security, and availability¹. This marks the latest milestone in the more than 30-year history of SQL Server.

SQL Server 2022 is a core element of the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. The platform seamlessly integrates operational databases, analytics, and data governance. This enables customers to adapt in real-time, add layers of intelligence to their applications, unlock fast and predictive insights, and govern their data—wherever it resides.

SQL Server 2022’s connections to Azure², including Azure Synapse Link and Microsoft Purview make it easier for customers to drive deeper insights, predictions, and governance from their data at scale. Azure integration also includes managed disaster recovery (DR) to Azure SQL Managed Instance, along with near real-time analytics, allowing database administrators to manage their data estates with greater flexibility and minimal impact to the end user³.

Performance and scalability are automatically enhanced via built-in query intelligence. Security innovation, building on SQL Server’s track record as being the least vulnerable database over the last 10 years, continues with Ledger for SQL Server, which uses blockchain to create a tamper-proof track record of time of all changes to the database.

Watch how one of our customers, Mediterranean Shipping Company, is already taking advantage of the new capabilities in SQL Server 2022.

Azure-enabled features

Link feature for Azure SQL Managed Instance: To ensure uptime, SQL Server 2022 is fully integrated with the new link feature in Azure SQL Managed Instance. With this new capability, you benefit from a PaaS environment applied to disaster recovery—allowing you to spend less time on setup and management even when compared to an IaaS environment. This works by using a built-in Distributed Availability Group (DAG) to replicate data to a previously deployed Azure SQL Managed Instance as a DR replica site. The instance is ready and waiting for whenever you need it—no lengthy configuration or maintenance required. You can also use this link feature in read scale-out scenarios to offload heavy requests that might otherwise affect database performance. We are working on building out more capabilities to support online disaster recovery.

Azure Synapse Link for SQL: Previously, moving data from on-premises databases, like SQL Server, to Synapse required you to use extract, transform, and load (ETL). Configuring and running an ETL pipeline is time-consuming, and insights often lag behind what is happening at any moment. Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 provides automatic change feeds to capture the changes within SQL Server and feed them into Azure Synapse Analytics. Synapse Link provides near real-time analysis and hybrid transactional and analytical processing with minimal impact on operational systems. Once the data comes to Synapse, you can combine it with many different data sources, regardless of their size, scale, or format, and run powerful analytics over all of it using your choice of Azure Machine learning, Spark, or Power BI. Because the automated change feeds only push what is new or different, data transfer occurs much faster and allows for near real-time insights, all with minimal impact on the performance of the source database in SQL Server 2022.

“Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 helps us to seamlessly replicate operational data in near real-time to be able to have more powerful analytics.”—Javier Villegas, IT Director for DBA and BI Service, Mediterranean Shipping Company.

Microsoft Purview integration: Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance and management service. We are excited to highlight that SQL Server is also integrated with Microsoft Purview for greater data discovery, allowing you to break down data silos. Through this integration you will be able to:

• Automatically scan your on-premises SQL Server for free to capture metadata.
• Classify your data using built-in and custom classifiers and Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels.
• Set up and control specific access rights to SQL Server.

Additional Azure-connected features: SQL Server 2022 has a number of additional Azure-enabled features. A simple connection to the Azure Arc agent, part of the default setup process for SQL Server 2022, enables additional capabilities, including:

• Single view of all SQL Servers deployed on-premises, in Azure and other clouds.
• Fully automated technical assessment for SQL Server at no additional cost, to help you optimize your database’s performance, scalability, security, business continuity, and more.
• Protect your on-premises data using Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
• Secure identities with Single Sign-On and Azure Active Directory.
• Pay-as-you-go billing.

Continued innovation to the core SQL Server engine

Performance: Performance is critical. On the SQL Server Engineering team, our core engine feature principles are: do no harm, no app changes required. With SQL Server 2022, performance enhancements come without requiring code changes by the end user.

SQL Server continues to offer differentiated performance, with #1 OLTP performance, #1 Non-Clustered DW performance on 1TB, 3TB, 10TB, and 30TB according to the independent Transaction Processing Performance Council. In SQL Server 2022:

• With Query Store, we are adding support for read replicas and enabling query hints to improve performance and quickly mitigate issues without having to change the source T-SQL.
• With Intelligent Query Processing, we’re expanding more scenarios based on common customer problems. For example, the “parameter sensitive plan” problem refers to a scenario where a single cached plan for a parameterized query is not optimal for all possible incoming parameter values. With SQL Server 2022’s Parameter Sensitive Plan optimization feature, we automatically enable the generation of multiple active cached plans for a single parameterized statement. These cached execution plans will accommodate different data sizes based on the provided runtime parameter values.

“As a company with 24/7 availability requirements, we are looking forward to embracing all SQL Server 2022 features that can make database failover faster, such as Buffer Pool Parallel Scan, ParallelRedo and Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) enhancements. On the development side, we expect to further utilize continuous improvements in the Intelligent Query Processing package. In an environment with a lot of servers and huge databases, even when you have people and resources to deal with performance issues, each feature that can improve performance or fix performance issues automatically or without touching the code is very valuable.” —Milos Radivojevic, Head of MSSQL Database Engineering at Entain.

Security: Over the past ten years, SQL Server has had few vulnerabilities. Building on this, the new Ledger for SQL Server feature creates a tamper-evidence track record of data modifications over time. This detects tampering by malicious actors and is beneficial for scenarios such as internal and external audits.

Availability: With Contained Availability Groups you can create an Always On availability group that manages its own metadata objects (users, logins, permissions) at the availability group level in addition to the instance level with contained availability groups. Additionally, it keeps multi-write environments running smoothly when you have users across multiple locations. With SQL Server 2022, we are automating the last-writer wins rule to ensure that when a conflict is detected, the most recent modification time will be chosen to be persisted on all replicas.

New pay-as-you-go SQL Server billing model, enabled by Azure Arc

Today, we are also excited to announce a new billing model that provides flexibility to innovate quickly and move as fast as you do.

Via a simple connection to Azure Arc, a default part of the SQL Server 2022 setup process, you now have access to a new cloud-enabled billing model for SQL Server, providing you with cost efficiency to pay only for what you use. Pay by the hour for consumption spikes and ad hoc usage without the need for upfront investment. Learn more in the announcement blog post.

Azure SQL migration offer

If you’re ready to start your journey to the cloud, Microsoft can help. Today we are announcing a new offer, the SQL + Apps Migration Factory. This program can assess and migrate qualifying low complexity SQL Server applications and databases to Azure SQL at no cost to you.⁴ Talk to your Microsoft account team or apply now at aka.ms/SQLAppsMigrationFactory to get started. 

SQL Server IoT 2022 

We are also announcing SQL Server IoT 2022, which is designed for fixed function use cases and licensed through the OEM channel under special dedicated use rights. You can read more about SQL Server IoT 2022.  

Learn more and get started with SQL Server 2022 today

• Learn more about SQL Server 2022 at the PASS Data Community Summit, including Microsoft and community-delivered keynote and general sessions.
• Visit the SQL Server 2022 website.
• Get ready for SQL Server 2022 by reading the documentation and watching SQL Server 2022 Data Exposed video series.
• Try out the Microsoft Learn SQL Server 2022 module and the SQL Server 2022 workshop.
• Get started today by deploying in Azure.
• Let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback through our SQL Server feedback portal.

Learn more about Azure SQL Managed Instance

• Learn about the November 2022 feature and other announcements at the PASS Data Community Summit.  
• Visit the Azure SQL Managed Instance website. 

^[1] SQL Server 2022 free editions (Developer edition, Express edition) are available to download starting today. SQL Server 2022 paid editions (Enterprise edition, Standard edition) will be available in Volume Licensing (Enterprise Agreement, Enterprise Agreement Subscriptions) and MPSA starting today, which represents the majority of SQL Server customers. Customers purchasing via CSP, OEM, and SPLA can begin purchasing SQL Server 2022 in January 2023.

^[2] For all Azure-connected features of SQL Server 2022, customers can optionally enable these capabilities based on business requirements.

^[3] The bidirectional disaster recovery capability of the Link feature for Azure SQL Managed Instance is available in limited public preview. Sign up for early access. General availability will occur at a future date.

^[4] Subject to the limitations described in the full SQL + Apps Migration Factory program specifications here, and provided that the SQL Server workloads are low complexity with no code changes, Microsoft agrees to assess and migrate SQL Server databases and SQL Server-associated applications from your datacenter or AWS EC2 to Azure at no cost to customer. Migrations must be completed by June 30, 2023. 

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Join us live in Seattle or virtually online, but don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn from the experts how to bring the full value of Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform to your organization.

This year, we continue the tradition of hosting a Microsoft day one keynote. We will also deliver a record-breaking 38 sessions, covering a wide array of themes and learning paths.  

We kick off the first official day of Summit on Wed., November 16. I invite you to join me and the Microsoft engineering team to learn how Microsoft’s Intelligent Data Platform—including data, analytics, and governance—can come together to help you get the full benefit of your data estate and do more with less. During the keynote, I will share new product announcements that you won’t want to miss, along with demos of some of the latest innovations from engineers like Anna Hoffman, Bob Ward, and Patrick Leblanc.

The keynote will be both live and in person at the Seattle Convention Center and live-streamed online and recorded, meaning registered attendees will have on-demand access. We highly encourage you to watch it live as we’ll discuss fresh topics and introduce some surprises along the way. Keep your eyes and ears open.

The event also connects you to peers and professionals while giving you the chance to talk with our engineers and advocates to learn about our latest solutions during our sessions and at our booth.

To register for Summit, visit the website and sign up today. Don’t forget to use the code AZURE175 at checkout to receive $175 off on the 3-Day, in-person conference pass.

Learn More

Learn more about our other sessions and Pre-cons in our post.

My team and I look forward to seeing you next week!   

The post PASS Data Community Summit 2022 keynote: Transform your data estate with Microsoft’s Intelligent Data Platform appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

Visit the event website to register to attend the free online conference from November 8–12, 2021.

I am pleased to note that Microsoft will join this year’s PASS Data Community Summit conference as the Premier Sponsor. This partnership allows us to continue to support attendees through educational sessions, product deep-dives and announcements, and keynotes unique to Summit.

This year, we will also introduce free workshops delivered by Microsoft Engineering for the first time at Summit. These hands-on instructor-led workshops are designed to help you learn new concepts, test ideas, and ask questions as you go.

PASS Data Community Summit goes far beyond the typical virtual conference experience. Featuring up to five days of online technical sessions you will have exclusive access to the industry’s top experts and rising stars, who will help you develop as a professional and master new skills that you can implement immediately. Interactive Q&A sessions ensure that you can ask questions and problem solve in real-time.

Community educational sessions will be available in both live and on-demand formats, and sessions and activities will be accessible for all time zones. Registration for the general conference is free and attendees will receive unlimited access to view on-demand sessions following the event.

There will also be casual networking opportunities, including community-led group discussions and events, where you can meet like-minded professionals, reconnect with old friends, and build lasting relationships with a diverse, worldwide data community.

Register for the PASS Data Community Summit today

To register, visit the PASS Data Community Summit website. My team and I look forward to joining you at this event!

The post Boost your skills by joining Microsoft at PASS Data Community Summit appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

It has been incredible to reflect on how this event continues to support our community, providing unique opportunities for us to learn, connect, and share. The friends we make along the way, the networking and business opportunities that arise out of hallway meetings, the product announcements, and the technical deep dives are all focused on building and supporting the community. Because we are in this with you, PASS Summit provides us with the privileged opportunity to be able to listen to the community. To sit and understand your own firsthand experiences with the products and together embark on a journey of driving the industry forward to meet the expectations of an ever-changing tech landscape.

So to start off, a simple thank you to each one of you for spending the time, money, and energy to be a part of this amazing, open community of data friends and fans. It’s going to be a great four days.

Microsoft Azure ❤ the PASS community

There are over 300,000 members of the PASS community, and you’re our closest peers and best advisors. Whether we see you on-site, online, or in one of the thousands of events being hosted by local and virtual chapters, each one of you has helped shape the way the world uses data.

Over the last twenty years of PASS Summits, we’ve worked side-by-side to drive innovation and provide solutions to companies around the globe. This is a great opportunity to hear directly from the people behind the products you love, as well as for you to share your own experiences and insights to shape future product roadmaps. This open exchange drives us to come back each year to deliver the latest product news, the best technical sessions and demos, to host open door Data Clinics, and connect with each of you at the social events.

Interesting facts about Microsoft at PASS Summit:

• Over 1,000 attendees visited the Microsoft booth in 2018
• Over 100 Microsoft staffers attend across the engineering, support, and marketing organizations
• Over 15 years ago, Bob Ward and a few members of our CSS team started the Data Clinic with just their laptops and few whiteboards in a spare room
• 10 years ago, the Data Clinic became a force of its own when Mark Souza and the SQLCAT team joined forces with CSS to provide free one-on-one sessions with Microsoft experts, something few other events in the world provide.

And of course, there are the amazing SQL Saturday events. I’ve had first-hand experience with these over the years and the amount of learning that occurs during a one-day session is phenomenal. We encourage everyone to sign up for these events and leverage the knowledge and insights from our industry experts. Thank you to the community organizers and local PASS chapters for creating this invaluable avenue of learning for both new and seasoned data professionals.

Get prepared for the biggest and best experience yet

2019 marks a big year for data at Microsoft. We have a fantastic booth experience with five solution areas and combined Data Clinic that provides coverage across the entire Azure Data landscape. Come check out the great sessions by our own seasoned SQL pros Bob Ward, Connor Cunningham, Sanjay Mishra, and Slava Oks.

This year the team has also put together an unplugged session with key engineering leaders joined by some of the MVPs. You will hear us talk about the inner workings of the engineering team and how we collaborate with MVP’s and our SQL Community.

Additionally, Gayle Sheppard, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data, will be involved in the Women in Technology events across the Summit, attending the day one keynote luncheon, and hosting a Women in Technology (WIT) focus group where she shares her professional perspective on the industry and imparts valuable insights into the data business.

Microsoft certification boot camps

We’ve partnered with PASS to bring you exclusive training, free practice tests, and discounted certifications. All attendees of each boot camp will receive a free Microsoft Official Practice Test.

Join me LIVE at the keynote!

I can’t wait to share some monumental announcements in my action-packed keynote tomorrow where I will take you along the journey of SQL Edge to Cloud.

Join me at the Microsoft Azure Keynote tomorrow at 8:00 AM PST or live stream.

Learn about Microsoft’s presence at PASS Summit today.

The post Welcome to the 21st annual PASS Summit appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

Hybrid connects all your data

Now more than ever, we are architecting for hybrid, because we are hearing from customers that they will be running data workloads on-premises and in the cloud – rarely just one or the other. We believe that the value Microsoft can add is to provide a great and consistent experience wherever they deploy.  One example of this commitment is Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, which was recently made generally available.  Managed Instance enables organizations to migrate their SQL Server workloads to Azure with zero code changes and offers an easy path to the cloud at an incredible value – and with security, intelligent performance and management tools that are unique to our cloud database services.  The end of extended support for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 next year is a great opportunity for customers to rehost to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, a fully-managed solution that eliminates the need for future upgrades. It’s easy to get there using comprehensive, yet easy-to use migration tools like Azure Database Migration Service.

Microsoft is excited to announce the general availability of Azure SQL Database Managed Instance Business Critical tier on December 1. Designed for mission-critical business apps with high I/O requirements, the business critical tier supports high availability with the highest level of storage and compute redundancy.  This new tier provides support for in-memory processing, a range of sizes up to 80 cores on Gen5, and zone-redundant HA using several isolated replicas to provide the highest resilience to failure.  We offer all this performance at an incredibly compelling price point—up to 85% less expensive than AWS.  Programs such as the Azure Hybrid Benefit, which allows customers to re-use their on-premises SQL Server licenses for discounts in Azure, and upcoming Reserved capacity pricing for Managed Instance Business Critical which allows you to prepay for a 1 or 3-year term commitment, further help you manage costs in the cloud.

In addition, we’re announcing a limited preview of Machine Learning services in Azure SQL Database. You can now use the Azure SQL Database support for Microsoft Machine Learning Services with R language to complete data processing, model training, and scoring all inside your SQL Database. This means you no longer need to move data out of the database to train and operationalize machine learning models. The R code can be deployed in production by embedding it in T-SQL stored procedures.

Azure is also a great destination for open source database migration. We recently announced an expansion to our relational OSS database managed service offerings with a preview of Azure Database for MariaDB. With MariaDB joining MySQL and PostgreSQL, Azure now offers the community versions of all the most popular OSS relational databases as managed services in the cloud, with advantages like built-in high availability, dynamic scaling and world-class security features.  When looking to migrate NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Cassandra to the cloud, Cosmos DB provides an excellent destination.  Customers gain access to managed NoSQL at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) vs. on-premises and cloud competitors not to mention the industry leading SLA, global distribution, and features that take all the work out of DevOps. You can get started today by using the Azure Cosmos DB API of your choice to migrate NoSQL data and apps from MongoDB, Cassandra, Hbase, and more, using a free trial of Azure Cosmos DB.

With SQL Server 2019, organizations can now seamlessly manage their structured and unstructured data in a single, integrated solution. It comes with big data capabilities built-in, including support for Apache Spark^TM and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)—everything you need to build a data lake with your SQL Server skills. Today we announce SQL Server 2019 community technology preview (CTP) 2.1 which has a number of new features for the database engine and big data clusters:

• Ability to deploy R and Python apps inside a SQL Server big data cluster
• Scalar UDF inlining feature in Intelligent query processing, optimizing a common performance problem scenario for User Defined Functions
• Derived table or view aliases in graph match queries
• Improved diagnostic data for long-running queries, helping to pinpoint when a query is blocked by stats background processing
• Ability to put buffer pool in persistent memory, dramatically speeding up I/O operations

And we have more planned for upcoming previews of SQL Server 2019, including Accelerated Data Recovery to speed up recovery processing, transaction rollback, readable secondaries, and adding availability groups for system databases which enables users to replicate linked server definitions, logins, and SQL Agent jobs to the secondary replicas.

Hybrid enables comprehensive AI and analytics

Having the most consistent data platform across on-premises and cloud enables us to offer AI and analytics over all your data. Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a cloud data warehouse that combines lightning fast query performance with advanced security features to turn all your data into actionable insights. Azure SQL Data Warehouse has been recognized as the fastest cloud data warehouse by third party benchmarks. Building upon its industry leading performance, today we announced significant security and usability updates. Customers can now take advantage of a new workload importance feature to influence query execution by priority, making sure high business value work gets first access to system resources. In addition, SQL Data Warehouse now offers native row level security, enabling customers to implement the most stringent security policies for fine-grained access control. Other new capabilities include support for SQL Server Data Tool, enhanced performance monitoring, advanced tuning and accelerated database recovery to significantly improve service usability. Learn more about this and other new features in today’s Azure SQL Data Warehouse blog. Experience the performance of Azure SQL Data Warehouse by creating your first data warehouse.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse also offers efficient and scalable structured streaming write support through native Azure Databricks connector. Azure Databricks is an Apache^® Spark™-based analytics platform that enables you to accelerate and simplify the process of building big data and AI solutions to drive the business forward, all backed by industry leading SLAs. We recently announced the preview of Azure Databricks Delta, a powerful transactional storage layer built on Apache Spark to provide better consistency of data and faster read access. Organizations also benefit from Azure Databricks’ native integration with other services like Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Cosmos DB. This enables new analytics solutions that support modern data warehousing, advanced analytics, and real-time analytics scenarios.

Announced at Ignite, the Azure Data Explorer preview is a fast, highly scalable data exploration service for log and telemetry data. It helps you handle many data streams, so you can collect, store, and analyze data. Azure Data Explorer is ideal for analyzing large volumes of diverse data from any data source, such as websites, applications, IoT devices, and more. Azure Data Explorer makes it simple to ingest this data and enables you to perform complex ad-hoc queries on the data in seconds.  Today at PASS, we’re excited to host one of our customers, Taboola, to demonstrate how their organization is using Azure Data Explorer to analyze web data in near real time, crunching large amounts of web data in order to provide the best content recommendations to webpage readers – all in real time.

Customers who want to stream data or analyze in real-time to get valuable insights faster need a massively scalable, distributed, event-driven messaging platform with multiple producers and consumers. Apache Kafka and Azure Event Hubs provide such distributed platforms.  Azure Event Hubs for Apache Kafka, now generally available, provides a Kafka endpoint that can be used by your existing Kafka-based applications as an alternative to running your own Kafka cluster. With Event Hubs for Kafka, you get the best of both worlds—the ecosystem and tools of Kafka, along with Azure’s security and global scale—in a fully managed solution.

Experience your data

Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) tools are evolving as well. Power BI already includes robust self-service data preparation capabilities in Power BI Desktop through the familiar Power Query based experiences that are used by millions of users worldwide. With the new public preview of dataflows in Power BI, we’re taking self-service data preparation to the next level, enabling business analysts to create data preparation logic that can be reused across multiple Power BI reports and dashboards and linked together to create sophisticated data transformation pipelines. Dataflows can be configured to store the data in the customer’s Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 instance, and dataflows support the Microsoft Common Data Model, giving organizations the ability to leverage a standardized and extensible collection of data schemas (entities, attributes, and relationships).

For our long-time BI customers with investments in SQL Server Reporting Services, with the public preview today, you can include pixel-perfect paginated reports alongside to Power BI’s existing interactive reports. This provides a unified, secure, enterprise-wide reporting platform accessible to any user across devices. You can read more about these innovations in a blog from Arun Ulagaratchagan, General Manager, Power BI Engineering.

Getting started

In conclusion, I’m excited to share with you that hybrid is here:  Microsoft’s consistent data platform across on-premises and cloud connects all your data and makes intelligence over all your data possible. We are proud to provide customers with the widest range of options to run SQL on Azure at the best price.  And our best-of-breed data analytics options bring AI to all your data.

•  If you’d like to watch my talk at PASS, you can sign in on the PASS website.  Registration is free and sessions the keynote content starts at 8:15 AM Pacific.
•  If you’re ready to get started, here are a few great places to get going:
  • Learn more about SQL Server 2019
  • Get started on your migration with a free trial of Azure Services, including Azure SQL Database

The post Harness the future with the ultimate hybrid platform for data and AI appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.