Official News from Microsoft’s Information Platform
This post was authored by Rohan Kumar, General Manager, Data Systems Group.
Welcome to Microsoft Ignite 2017! I hope you are able to join us in person, or virtually through the Ignite Live Stream, to hear our exciting product announcements for your Data Estate.
This afternoon, I’ll be speaking in the Data General Session about the investments Microsoft has made across our Data and Analytics portfolio. From key announcements about the availability of SQL Server 2017 on Linux and Docker, to innovative programs that let you use on-premises SQL Server licenses to easily lift and shift to the cloud, to great price and performance for analytics workloads in Azure, we have lots of ways to help you unleash the power of your data, across the entire Data Estate. You’ll also get to hear from customers who have come with us on this journey, and whose investments in data and analytics have led to out-innovating and out-performing their competition.
Let’s take a look at some of the products and features you’ll hear more about.
With SQL Server 2017, we’ve made huge strides of choice for the data platform, and one of the heroes of our new choice paradigm is SQL Server 2017. Starting next Monday, October 2, customers will be able to bring the industry-leading performance and security of SQL Server to Linux and Docker Enterprise Edition containers for production workloads. SQL Server 2017 delivers a mission-critical database with everything built-in, on the platform of your choice. And, it can unlock seamless DevOps with Docker Enterprise Edition containers, bringing efficiency and simplicity to your innovation. As one customer reported:
“The Linux switchover was very easy. We didn’t have to do anything custom for Azure. It was literally plug and play,” said Dean Chen, VP of Engineering for dv01.
Today we are also announcing a SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux offer to help with upgrades and migrations. This offer provides up to 30% off SQL Server 2017 through an annual subscription. When customers purchase new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to support their SQL Server, they will be eligible for another 30% off their operating system. In addition to discounts on SQL Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, all of this is backed by integrated support from Microsoft and Red Hat.
Upgrading now to SQL Server 2017 will get you access to these cool features:
With Microsoft’s cloud-first development principle, you’ll find many of these same advances in our database-as-a-service: Azure SQL Database brings your workloads industry-leading performance and security, all on the same core engine as SQL Server.
With intelligent features like Threat Detection and auto-tuning built-in, Azure SQL Database offers the most productive database service, ideal for managing and modernizing data estate with thousands of databases — delivering a 406% ROI¹ to organizations. Today, we are announcing the upcoming public preview for SQL Database Managed Instance, an expansion to the service which offers close to full compatibility with SQL Server — ideal for migrating database estate to Azure for hassle-free operations. We are also announcing an upcoming public preview for Azure Database Migration Service which will streamline the movement of databases to Azure including SQL Server to Azure SQL Database. But we aren’t stopping there. We will make Azure the most economical and logical choice for existing SQL Server customers with the addition of Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server, a way to re-use on-premises SQL Server licenses to run database-as-a-service in Azure. Azure Hybrid Benefit offers customers big savings compared to moving to other public clouds.
“We wanted the best of what we do in our data center, which is reliable SQL Servers on flash storage. With the best of what Azure could bring to it… For us we found Azure SQL Database was the best way to do it. We deploy our SQL Server’s schema element into a Managed Instance and we point the application via connection string change directly over the managed instance. We basically picked up our existing infrastructure and were able to deploy to Azure within a few seconds. It allows us to scale the business very quickly, with very minimal effort. The holy grail in a move like this is being able to lift your existing platform, move it into Azure without significant amounts of work, without having to re-engineer things,” said Eric Fleischman, Vice President & Chief Architect of DocuSign.
In addition to making it easier than ever to move to Azure SQL Database, we’re building in new capabilities that make it more compelling than ever to move. SQL Database has new Machine Learning Services for R language advanced analytics, a service that provides a platform for building and deploying intelligent applications in the cloud. And we’re adding other capabilities that leverage SQL Database’s cloud architecture: Intelligent Insights provide automated monitoring at scale and detection of any database performance degradations, faster than possible with traditional means. Not only that the issue is detected, but a root cause analysis is provided to the user, to easily decide on the best way to mitigate problems. With the new Vulnerability Assessment, customers can proactively improve the security state of their database. They get visibility into their security settings and vulnerabilities, and concrete steps to resolve issues and lock down security settings – an important issue if you’re subject to EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations.
We are helping customers transform with analytics and AI through faster performance, reduced time to value, and intelligence that can redefine customer interactions. With cloud-first innovation, you get a superset of business intelligence and analytics features that work across your entire Data Estate – on-premises and in the cloud.
Azure Data Factory is a data integration service that now lets you create, schedule, and orchestrate data integration pipelines at scale wherever your data lives, in the cloud or on premises. You can meet security and compliance needs for your data while taking advantage of Azure Data Factory’s extensive orchestration and data movement capabilities while paying only for what you use.
Now in public preview, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) customers can easily lift SSIS packages into the cloud using new managed SSIS hosting capabilities in Data Factory. Coming soon, customers who have active SQL Server license on SQL Server will be able to take advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server to receive discounted rates on SSIS execution in Data Factory.
Customers are already using these new features to speed data integration. Said David B. McAuley, CTO for Lumedx, “Azure Data Factory has simplified the integration of data from multiple hybrid sources at scale and enabled us to leverage big data and analytics offerings in Azure to drive better health outcomes for our customers.”
Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a fully-managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse based on SQL Server. Soon we’ll preview a new performance tier that offers 2x the performance and 5x the scale of the current performance tier. This new compute-optimized performance tier leverages the latest Azure hardware with data caching through low-latency Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe)-based solid-state disks for the most demanding data warehouse workloads.
