Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure SQL MI is a fully managed instance of SQL Server (Enterprise Edition) that’s hosted and fully managed by Microsoft as a PaaS service; it is intended to have near full parity with SQL Server instances that you would implement and manage yourself, either on-premises or as IaaS VMs. Think of it as SQL Server as a service.
The following are some of the benefits and capabilities of Azure SQL MI:
- It provides frictionless lift-and-shift scenarios. This is good for new applications or existing legacy applications that want to move to a cloud-hosted solution, require minimal app changes, and wish to take advantage of the latest SQL Server features and database engine.
- It provides a full SQL Server Enterprise Edition database engine instance that’s nearly 100% compatible with customer-implemented, owned, and managed SQL Server instances, as would be the case for on-premises deployments or those running on Azure IaaS VMs.
- All the functionality and capabilities of PaaS services are provided, along with IaaS control.
- Full isolation and security.
- VNet implementation and private IP addresses.
- SQL authentication or Azure AD authentication; Windows authentication is not supported.
- Available as a general-purpose and business-critical service tier. It also supports single-instance and instance pools.
This section looked at SQL MI. In the next section, we will look at Azure SQL Database.
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database is a relational database PaaS service that provides Microsoft-hosted, single-instance databases based on the SQL server database engine. Being a PaaS service, Microsoft manages the SQL Server platform, so you don’t have to; you can just focus on the database level and the data tasks you wish to perform against it with your data. Think of it as SQL database as a service.
The following are some of the benefits and capabilities of Azure SQL Database:
- It is a fully managed PaaS SQL server platform; you can just focus on the databases and the data.
- It is optimized for modern cloud applications where no legacy requirements or integrations exist.
- It can be used in conjunction with serverless solutions.
- Single databases and elastic pools can be created.
- It is priced on a vCore and a Data Transaction Unit (DTU) model, which provides a provisioned and serverless compute tier and the general-purpose, business-critical, and hyperscale service tiers.
- Scale-up and scale-down moving to a different tier is possible; there is no horizontal scaling, which means you cannot provide availability/scale-out to other regions.
This section looked at Azure SQL Database. In the next section, we will look at Azure Database for MySQL.
