>> In the last video,
we talked about some of the Azure
SQL Managed Instance deployment options,
as well as the Service Tiers.
In this video, we're going to dive into
the same thing for Azure SQL Database.
>> Now, before, when we talked about Managed Instance,
your first choice was to choose
a SQL Instance or an Instance Pool.
For database, you have a similar choice.
You're going to pick a Single Database
with several different options
which we'll talk about or something called an Elastic Pool.
An Elastic Pool is something we
developed several years ago, especially for hosters,
that have a scenario where they have
a large number of databases they want to provide for
their customers but want to share
resources and cost amongst those databases.
Again, you first pick a Single Database or an Elastic Pool,
and then you need to make another choice.
Before, with Managed Instance, you picked
a vCore purchasing model.
Well, for database, you actually have
two choices for your purchasing model: You've,
something called a Database Transaction Unit model,
which is one of our earlier models we first
released with what was called SQL Azure back then,
where you pick things based on what's called a
Database Transaction Unit measurement
and different tiers within that,
and the vCore model is actually what we recommend.
You picked your database or a pool,
now you pick your purchasing option,
and if you choose the vCore model,
then like Managed Instance,
you're going to have service tier choices.
>> For Azure SQL Database,
there are three service tiers available.
Two of them we're familiar with are the
same from Managed Instance.
That's the General Purpose and Business Critical tier.
The same sort of recommendation
and guidance is going to go along here.
Most of our customers are going to be
just fine on General Purpose,
whereas some customers might want some of
the extra benefits that come with Business Critical.
These are the exact same comparisons as with SQL Managed Instance.
With Business Critical, you're going to
have everything on local SSD,
you're going to get better IO Per Second,
you're going to spend a little bit more
in comparison to General Purpose
and we're going support you for your in-memory OLTP workloads.
Now, one thing that's different from
General Purpose in Azure SQL Database
versus SQL Managed Instance is this idea of Serverless compute.
In all the other tiers,
you only choose between Provisioned compute,
there's no choice actually.
With General Purpose, you can choose
between Provisioned and Serverless compute.
Serverless is really going to be
good for those scenarios where you
have intermittent or unpredictable workloads.
Because while you're running,
we can scale you on a per-second basis
to the max CPU or memory that you
need at that time and we can use
some clever caching to bring you back down.
But when you're into a period of inactivity,
for example, maybe it's
a business application and no one really uses it after hours,
we'll actually shut down SQL Server and
separate the compute from the storage,
and during that time,
you're only going to pay for the storage and not the compute.
This can be great cost savings for things like
business applications or applications that have weird cycles,
or even your DevTest workloads.
Those are the two tiers that have been around for a while.
There's also a third tier called Hyperscale.
>> Hyperscales is an amazing technology our
customers in the last few years had told us that
the sizes of their databases are pretty
large when it comes to SQL enterprise applications.
The size limits today for Azure Database
for General Purpose and Business Critical,
which is four and eight terabytes,
just doesn't quite frankly meet
the needs of some of our large-scale customers.
We created a technology called Hyperscale,
it was called Project Socrates,
and this is going to use a different
architecture behind the scenes,
but it's going to still feel like an Azure SQL Database.
Your interactions with it are the same,
but there's many great advantages to it.
It's going to give you a highly scalable storage
and even more capabilities for read,
replica, and scale requirements.
What we're going to do is we're going to use
a combination of local and remote storage.
Your databases are going to be remote storage,
but we're going to use something called Caches.
There's going to be a series of local storage across
several different nodes to cache things like
database pages or transaction log data.
Now, IOPS are going to be
similar to what you have for something like Business Critical,
we're going to get a lot more IOPS and
you say from General Purpose,
but here's the key, you're going to get unlimited storage.
Today, we support
even up to 100-terabyte databases as a Hyperscale,
we expect that to even go further.
Scaling operations are constant as you're
changing your scaling needs for Hyperscale.
The time it takes to scale from a couple of CPUs to
80 CPUs is a constant time.
One of the best benefits is your ability to get more replicas.
By default, you don't even have to have any replicas.
As you choose replicas,
you get high availability,
but you can even get up to four read replicas
in a read-scale fashion from Hyperscale.
You see, Hyperscale is that third option from
General Purpose and Business Critical that is really meant for
that scaling need for Azure SQL Database customers.
Now one possible last choice
you may have to make is hardware choices.
We try to abstract you from that,
but you may have some choices you need to make to take
advantage of modern hardware platforms in Azure.
>> Yeah, and today,
at the time of this recording,
at least the main hardware choice for you
is going to be this Gen5 hardware.
But what you'll see over time is that we're always going to be
adopting the latest and greatest hardware that
can give you additional capabilities.
On the right, you'll see some options
that are currently available in
preview and you can expect that
over time these are going to change.
You might see Gen7,
Gen8, or even a different naming system.
Just know that we're going to keep
evolving this hardware to give you the latest and
greatest capabilities as far as getting you
more storage or getting you more vCores.
Now you've seen some of the different options
that are available for Azure SQL Database,
whether it's the DTU or the vCore model,
or the Service Tier,
or the Hardware choices.
A lot of options, but we're just trying to make it so
you can get exactly what you need when you need it.
Stay tuned for the next video.