At its Build 2017 developer conference, Microsoft announced fully managed instances of MySQL and PostgreSQL on the Azure cloud platform, alongside a new NoSQL database, Cosmos DB. Kicking off this year"s Build event, the tech giant has introduced a bunch of new capabilities for the aforementioned offerings.
For starters, Cosmos DB now includes a "serverless" pricing model that aims to address the managing of small applications with fewer users. Pricing will be calculated based on a per-operation model in order to keep it cost-effective as a whole. Essentially, customers will be billed on the actual consumption of resources upon each database request.
Moving on, enhanced data recovery options are now also being provided for mission-critical workloads, enabling such apps to do the following:
- Bring their own keys for enhanced end-to-end encryption of their data
- Recover data from a specific period and restore at any time with point-in-time backup and restore
- Access Version 4 of Azure Cosmos DB’s Java SDK
- Use new delete functionality in Azure Cosmos DB change feed
And finally, Cosmos DB auto-scale provisioned throughput is now also generally available. The capability - previously termed autopilot - offers 99.999% guaranteed availability along with single-digit millisecond latency that leverages SLA. Auto-scaling based on customer-set provisioned throughputs means that customers do not need to manage scaling requirements themselves. Its full set of capabilities will become available in the summer.
With regards to MySQL and PostgreSQL offerings in Azure Database, there are also a bunch of new capabilities. For the latter, logical decoding with wal2json is now in preview, while online migration for PostgreSQL Hyperscale using the Migration Service is now generally available. As far as the former is concerned, AD authentication, Private Link, and 3-year Reserved Instances Pricing have reached GA. Data encryption at rest with Customer Managed Keys will be making its way to users in June in the form of a preview.
Microsoft has also highlighted its community contributions to PostgreSQL. These include:
- Increasing scalability and reducing OOM occurrences with disk-based hash aggregation
- Improving the performance and features of PostgreSQL
More information on the updated product capabilities can be found at Azure Database for PostgreSQL"s documentation here, and MySQL"s documentation here.