Every field of IT, like databases, has been transformed by the cloud. Microsoft is a leader in this area, offering a wide variety of Azure services to meet every data requirement. Users can easily deploy one or more databases to virtual machines or applications as part of the shared elastic pools by using various database services from Azure. Using Azure storage services, you can conveniently migrate different databases, schemas, and artefacts from a variety of sources to the cloud.
This article is going to be your information goldmine for the Azure Database Services. Let’s dive deeper into this ever changing world of the cloud.
Important Azure Database Service
The SQL database is the fundamental building block present in Azure Database. Azure SQL Database is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) database engine that handles most of the database management functions such as upgrading, patching, backups, and monitoring without user involvement. With 99.99 percent availability, Azure SQL Database is always operating on the most recent stable version of the SQL Server database engine and a patched OS. The built-in PaaS capabilities of Azure SQL Database enable you to concentrate on the domain-specific database administration and optimization tasks that are essential to your business.
You can build a highly accessible and high-performance data storage layer for Azure applications and solutions using Azure SQL Database. Since it allows you to process both relational data and non-relational structures like graphs, JSON, spatial, and XML, SQL Database can be the best option for a number of modern cloud applications.
SQL Database is a fully managed service with high availability, backups, and other standard maintenance operations built in. Microsoft is in charge of all SQL and operating system code patching and updates.
Deployment models
For a database, Azure SQL Database offers the following deployment options:
- A Single Database is an isolated, fully controlled database. If you have modern cloud applications and microservices that require single reliable data source, you might consider this choice
- An Elastic Pool is a set of single databases that share resources such as CPU or memory. Single databases can move into and out of an elastic pool.
Benefits of Azure Database Services
Azure SQL Database helps you build apps that scale with the pace of your business with managed and intelligent SQL. Moreover, Automated, AI-powered features that are always up to date will improve their performance and reliability. Also, you may concentrate on developing new applications, rather than worrying about storage size or resource management with serverless computing and Hyperscale storage options that automatically scale resources on demand. In addition to these, it offers various other benefits like:
Fully managed and Latest Version
With a completely managed SQL database, you can eliminate the hassle of configuring and maintaining high availability, tuning, backups, and other database activities. Accelerate your application growth using the new SQL Server capabilities in the only cloud with evergreen SQL, and never think about updates, enhancements, or end of support again.
Your most demanding workloads can be hyper scaled.
Overcome resource limitations that could be affecting the success of your application’s performance. By quickly scaling capacity up to 100 TB, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale adapts to evolving needs. Regardless of the scale of the data operation, flexible, cloud-native architecture allows storage to expand as required & allows you to back up data almost instantly and restore the database in minutes.
Optimise costs with a compute that scales automatically.
With provisioned and serverless computing options, you can build modern apps your way. With computing resources that instantly scale depending on workload requirement, Azure SQL Database serverless simplifies performance management. It also allows developers to concentrate on designing applications faster and more effectively.
SQL Database serverless is ideal for situations where use is intermittent and unpredictable since you only pay for the computing resources you use per second. This results in better overall price performance.
Built-in AI
You get built-in intelligence with SQL Database that lets you significantly reduce the costs of running and maintaining databases while also maximising the efficiency and security of your application. SQL Database gathers and processes a vast amount of telemetry data while completely protecting consumer privacy by running millions of customer workloads around the clock. Various algorithms continuously evaluate the telemetry data so that the service can learn and adapt to your application. So, with a SLA of up to 99.995 percent, built-in AI and built-in high availability ensure optimal performance and longevity in your applications.
Advanced security and compliance
Your data is safe thanks to several layers of security, built-in controls, and intelligent threat detection that are offered by Azure Database Services. SQL Database provides a range of built-in security and compliance features to help your application meet various security and compliance requirements.
Eventually, all these benefits help Azure Database Services to build and deliver modern, intelligent apps faster in addition to the following:
- Firstly, with familiar tools like Visual Studio and Azure Data Studio, you can develop on popular platforms like Windows etc.
- Secondly, Build intelligent applications faster using popular languages such as .NET, Java, Node.js, Ruby, PHP and Python.
- Thirdly, Implement CI/CD Pipelines with Azure DevOps or GitHub.
- Also, Manage and scale your entire application and data stack using Azure App Service.
- Further, Simplify .NET app integration with native support in SQL Database and App Service.
Azure Database Services
Azure provides a number of services for migrating data to the cloud from various sources or from on-premise SQL server data. Database services offer different services tiers and compute size based on the data as well as have dynamic scalability. Let us understand these services in detail.
Azure Database Migration Service
A fully managed service for migrating data from variety of databases and on-premise SQL servers to Azure data platform. This seamless migration has fewer user interactions and optimized times thanks to online integration. This service also provides high availability to consumers for a variety of existing Azure tools and services. Azure Database Migration Service has a premium pricing tier based on this managed instance.
SQL Server Stretch Database Service
Azure migrates cold or infrequently accessed data to the cloud using the Stretch database. It replicates data to the cloud in a clear and secure manner. If data is stretched to the cloud or on-premise servers, transferring data with a stretch database is cost-effective and does not require many changes to queries or applications. Also. users can migrate data stored in specific tables as entire table. Moreover, this service has a filter condition based on data, allowing users to filter out hot and cold data and migrate only specific rows.
SQL Data Sync Service
The SQL Data Sync Service is based on the sync group. This Azure SQL database service synchronises data bi-directionally across multiple databases in the cloud or on-premise machines. It uses a hub-and-spoke topology to synchronise data, with the hub database always being an Azure SQL database.
Azure Data Factory Service
The Data Factory service is a cloud-based ETL (Extract Transform Load) and integration service that is managed. It is used to extract the necessary data and perform transformations on the data in order to analyse logs for data and gain a better insight into the data. Users can build data-driven ETL pipelines for data movement and transformation at scale using data factory.
Azure SQL Managed Instance
The insightful, scalable cloud database service Azure SQL Managed Instance combines the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility with all the benefits of a completely managed and evergreen platform as a service. By combining your expertise with familiar tools, skills, and resources, you can confidently modernise your existing apps at scale with SQL Managed Instance and do more with what you already have.
Azure SQL Edge
Azure SQL Edge, which runs on ARM64 & x64 architecture, brings the security and performance of Microsoft SQL engine to edge. This edge computing productivity tool blends new capabilities like data streaming and time series with in-database machine learning & graph features. So you can extend applications to IoT edge gateways and devices for real-time insights in connected, disconnected or hybrid environments.
Azure Cosmos Database
Azure Cosmos database is a NoSQL database that Azure uses to store structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. It is highly accessible (99.999%), dynamically scalable, and has very low latency when loading and retrieving data. The Cosmos database aids in the management of real-time data with major changes that are handled by big data technology. Users can enable the cosmos database service with a single button. Moreover, they can store data across global regions, making it a globally distributed and multi-modal database. Since it is a NoSQL database, it does not need schema or index maintenance. The database engine handles the schema automatically. As a result, there is no application downtime because Cosmos DB indexes the data automatically. It comes with built-in encryption and security features.
Azure Active Directory
All Azure databases must be protected, and connections from established sources must be accepted. All of these database services come with firewall rules. They enable us to specify which IP addresses we want to allow connections from. We can use certain firewall rules to restrict the number of connections and narrow the attack surface.
So, Azure Active Directory secures all the services provided as part of database service and also integrates all these services. It uses the security center to monitor all these services. While an individual monitoring tool is available, Azure security centre will continue to track all of these services and provide recommendations if anything goes wrong.
Summing Up
To wrap it up, with Azure Database Services you get a seamless, reliable experience across your entire SQL portfolio, as well as a wide variety of deployment solutions, from edge to cloud. Azure SQL database services are intelligent and stable, making it simple to migrate your SQL workloads, and modernise your existing applications. Also, as part of the Azure service, the Azure Storage service manages tracking, and maintenance, and databases can be scaled depending on demand and managed instances can be built. Moreover, you can move all kinds of data to Azure Cloud using the Azure database service. It supports SQL databases as well as NoSQL databases like Cosmos and Maria DB. These services help you concentrate on getting more comprehensive results from your data.
