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Microsoft has announced the latest addition to its Azure cloud offerings for SQL Server: Azure SQL Database Managed Instance. This new product is still in preview, but it promises to fill a significant gap for those customers looking to lift and shift applications backed by Microsoft SQL Server from on premise to the cloud. Managed Instances join the other offerings--of both the Singleton and Elastic Pools variety--for the Azure SQL Database line of products and services.
Until the release of Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, the options for Microsoft Azure SQL Database deployments constrained access to any SQL Server instance level settings. There were also no options in either Singleton or Elastic Pools for SQL Server Agent, the job scheduling and execution service for Microsoft SQL Server. Database administrators found the lack of control over instance-level settings such as min/max server memory and parallelism to be too limiting to effectively control performance.
Even more damning was the lack of SQL Server Agent in either Singleton or Elastic Pools. This gap severely limited the ability for enterprises to lift and shift their SQL Server instances from on premise to the cloud because the agent is used extensively for SQL Server job scheduling--for everything from routine database maintenance tasks to complex data warehouse loading processes, as well as critical business logic that runs in the data layer but requires execution at specific times or on a repeatable schedule.
The inability to control instance-level behavior for SQL Server and to schedule specific tasks natively inside of SQL Server through SQL Server Agent forced a decision between remaining in an “earthed” solution on...