We are excited to get back in front of customers at Microsoft Ignite 2023 and PASS Data Community Summit to announce powerful product enhancements across Microsoft Azure databases designed to help customers take the next step or the first step in their transformation journey, with databases that are intelligent, trusted, and ready for developers to build, without limits.   

Limitless innovation for cloud native applications

If you are an application developer looking for a flexible relational cloud database solution with performance and scalability to support your most demanding applications, you’ll want to check out Microsoft Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. Built on a unique architecture that splits the storage and compute nodes, these resources scale independently to meet the unique requirements of your apps. Plus, you can eliminate the need to pre-provision storage resources, as the storage automatically scales to meet demand, with support of up to 100 TB. We are thrilled to announce that we are introducing lower compute pricing on SQL Database Hyperscale, saving customers up to 35 percent on their compute bill. Effective December 15, 2023, customers will have competitive pricing on the resources they need to build scalable, secure, AI-ready applications. 

We’re also excited to share that the Microsoft Azure SQL Managed Instance feature wave has reached general availability. This set of features improves Azure SQL Managed Instance’s performance, reliability, and security. The latest release will deliver deeper integration with Microsoft SQL Server on-premises and the wider Azure service platform. And soon, customers will be able to start testing Azure SQL Managed Instance for free. Landing in December 2023, customers will be able to run proof of concepts, test applications or simply learn more about the operational benefits of a fully managed database-as-a-service. This is in addition to the free Azure SQL Database offer that launched in October 2023.  

Microsoft is also excited to share the newest updates for our fully managed community based open-source databases. These services help you manage your database and database infrastructure with automation, freeing you from the routine database management tasks so you can concentrate on what matters most.

Enhanced performance and scalability for Microsoft Azure Database for PostgreSQL

The latest enhancements for Azure Database for PostgreSQL deliver advanced storage and compute capabilities that enable optimal price-performance for enterprise production workloads. Customers can expect enhancements for advanced storage, compute capabilities, and flexibility for managing performance and cost.  

Azure Database for PostgreSQL extension for Azure AI

The PostgreSQL extension for Azure AI allows developers to use large language models (LLMs) and build rich PostgreSQL generative AI applications, meaning PostgreSQL queries on Azure can now power Azure AI applications. It enables calling into Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to generate LLM-based vector embeddings that allow efficient similarity searches, which is particularly powerful for recommendation systems, as well as calling into Azure AI Language for a wide range of scenarios such as sentiment analysis, language detection, entity recognition, and more.

New performance enhancements in Microsoft Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical 

New performance enhancements in Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical service tier makes it ideal for high-performance transactional or analytical applications. In fact, a recent performance benchmark study by Principled Technologies shows that Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical service tier is up to 50 percent faster than MySQL on Amazon Web Services Relational Data Service and up to 2.26 times faster than Google Cloud Platform Cloud SQL for MySQL. These key innovations help make Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical the perfect option to run mission-critical, Tier 1 MySQL workloads.

Extend Azure to your entire data estate

For all the innovation that customers are driving in the cloud, we recognize much of the customer’s data remains on-premises. This is why Microsoft continues to invest heavily in ensuring that customers can get the most from their entire data estate with Microsoft Azure Arc. The latest monitoring capabilities from SQL Server-enabled by Azure Arc are designed to deliver critical insights across your entire SQL Server environments, optimizing database performance and delivering fast diagnostic times.  

Customers can also now improve SQL Server business continuity and consistency by viewing and managing Always On availability groups, failover cluster instances, and backups directly from the Azure portal. This capability provides better visibility and an easier, more flexible way to configure critical database operations.  

In addition, with Extended Security Updates as a service and automated patching, customers can always keep their apps secure, compliant, and up to date. Learn more about these latest features.

We look forward to the week ahead and connecting with you in person.

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