Since Microsoft’s initial announcement of their upcoming release of SQL Server 2022, there’s been plenty of excitement – especially amongst those with interests in Azure. This latest version is Microsoft’s most Azure-enabled release yet with continued innovation across performance, security, and availability.
In this era of unprecedented reliance and importance of business data there is both a tremendous opportunity and also potential challenges. Companies are seeing their relational and nonrelational data proliferate exponentially on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, and in hybrid environments. The most transformative companies drive predictive insights on current data, whereas others may struggle to drive even reactive insights to their historical data. Information may be siloed across geographies and divisions.
To empower customers amid this environment, Microsoft offers an end-to-end data platform of products and services that come together to meet these challenges. Operational databases cover all possible deployment locations, including SQL Server and Azure Arc-enabled data services, Azure SQL fully-managed cloud databases, and Azure SQL Edge for IoT devices. To enable real-time insights, Azure Synapse Analytics brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics, and customers can visualize their data with Power BI. Customers can discover, catalog, and govern their data wherever it resides with Azure Purview.
SQL Server 2022 integrates with Azure Synapse Link and Azure Purview to enable customers to drive deeper insights, predictions, and governance from their data at scale. Cloud integration is enhanced with disaster recovery (DR) to Azure SQL Managed Instance, along with no-ETL (extract, transform, and load) connections to cloud analytics, which allow database administrators to manage their data estates with greater flexibility and minimal impact to the end-user. Performance and scalability are automatically enhanced via built-in query intelligence. There is choice and flexibility across languages and platforms, including Linux, Windows, and Kubernetes.
Below we take a look at a handful of new features as part of this release. If you should have any questions around licensing or migration options, please send us a message and we’ll be happy to help!
SQL Server 2022 — Business continuity through Azure
Increase Uptime
- Deploy and configure easily with PaaS.
- Optionally use Azure SQL Managed Instance for read-scale out.
- Built-in distributed availability group (DAG).
- Restore Azure SQL Managed Instance databases back to SQL Server.
SQL Server 2022 — Seamless analytics over on-premises operational data
Real-Time Insights
- Break the wall between operational and analytical stores.
- New change feed capability reduces impact on OLTP workloads.
- Near real-time latency between SQL Server and Synapse Analytics.
- Analyze all your data using both Spark and SQL runtimes in Synapse.
SQL Server 2022 — Visibility over your entire data estate
Break Down Data Silos
- Automatically scan on-premises SQL Server to capture metadata across multiple SQL deployments edge to cloud.
- Classify data using built-in and custom classifiers and Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels.
- Set up and control specific access rights to SQL Server.
SQL Server 2022 — Most secure over the last 10 years
Tamper-Proof Track Record of Data Over Time
- Use a cryptographically hashed ledger to detect tampering and by malicious actors.
- Establish digital trust in a centralized system using blockchain technology.
- Attest to other parties that data integrity has not been compromised.
SQL Server 2022 — Industry-leading performance and availability
Accelerate query performance with no code changes
- Query Store now turned on by default .
- Query hints to shape plans with no code changes.
- Support for read replicas from availability groups.
- New IQP scenarios enabled through better together capabilities.
SQL Server 2022 — Industry-leading performance and availability
Multi-master writes for users across multiple locations
- Globally distributed database replicas for geo-localized writes.
- Enhanced conflict detection for inserts and updates with Last Writer Wins (LWW) capabilities.
- Ensures the last update is persisted across all replicas based on the UTC time of the operation.
Data lake virtualization and object storage
Query any data lake and backup/restore SQL to object storage
- Query data where it resides with data virtualization.
- Support for REST API and new native types like Parquet, json, and Delta.
- REST API compatible object storage for backup and restore.
Language enhancements for developers
Use your T-SQL skills to do more than ever
- New JSON functions to increase ability to query and manipulate JSON data.
- Enhanced T-SQL Surface Area closes language gaps based on customer feedback and ANSI compatibility.
- Brings Azure SQL Edge support for T-SQL functions to process time series data (telemetry at intervals).