Azure Content Spotlight - SQL Azure

Welcome to another Azure Content Spotlight! These articles are used to highlight items in Azure that could be more visible to the Azure community.

Recently there have been some significant updates to SQL Azure and some interesting posts.  I wanted to highlight the following: Threat Detection, Automatic Tuning, Temporal Tables, and Cross Database Joins in a hybrid environment.

Azure SQL Database Threat Detection identifies potential threats to the database and provides immediate notifications and recommendations when potential suspicious activity is detected.  Threat Detection learns over time in order to identify anomalies in the activity of the database.  Please see the excellent post Azure SQL Database Threat Detection, your built-in security expert for more information.

In addition to detecting threats, Azure SQL also supports analyzing the database for potential ways to improve performance.  Another great benefit to hosting SQL in Azure!  Take a look at Improved Automatic Tuning boosts your Azure SQL Database performance for an introduction to this feature.

Historical data just got easier.  Much easier.  Instead of rolling your own solution, Temporal Tables allows full history of data changes to be tracked.  With one simple mechanism both auditing and trend analyses could be catered for.  Please see Temporal Tables are generally available in Azure SQL Database for more information.

David Pallman provides a great illustration of how to perform cross-database joins between Azure and local SQL Databases in Azure SQL Database Cross Database Joins with Local Databases.  Not new capability but something that is often overlooked in hybrid environments.