Azure Managed Instance

Welcome to Azure Every Day. I’d like to talk about a feature that Microsoft announced at Ignite last year that I’m excited about, and it’s called Azure Managed Instance. This is still in private preview, but it’s surely worth watching out for the official roll out in respect to Azure and SQL databases.

Azure Managed Instance will look like an on premises SQL database instance, but in the cloud. We can easily deploy multiple databases to what looks like an on-prem system. It has nearly 100% SQL Server compatibility with all the benefits of a Platform as a Service (PaaS). With this, we don’t have to manage all the infrastructure or the OS and SQL Server patching behind the scenes.

What are some of the other benefits?

• SQL Server Agent is back, so we can schedule some of our tasks within our databases using our SQL Server Agent.
• Cross database querying (a game changer in my opinion). Many of the clients I work with couldn’t easily move their SQL database to an Azure SQL database because they had cross database querying. Now with managed instance, we can migrate our SQL databases from on prem to managed instance, and everything works as expected.
• We also get the benefit of many of the other built-in intelligent optimizations that Microsoft has, such as the SQL Database Advisor, adaptive query processing and global-scale ability and availability.
• Possibly the most important benefit is the advantage of Microsoft’s industry leading advanced security, with transparent data encryption and SQL threat detection.

In short, with Azure Managed Instance, we not only get the benefit of easily taking our on premise databases and shifting them up into a managed instance, we also get all the other great features of Azure SQL database.

If you’d like to learn more about Azure Managed Instance or Azure SQL database or anything Azure related, we’d love to help. Click the link below to contact us to talk about Azure today.