Microsoft’s Azure SQL Can Now Store Up To 500GB, Gets 99.95% SLA And Adds Self-Service Recovery

As part of its larger updates to Azure today, Microsoft announced that SQL databases on the service, available later this month in the premium tier, will be able to store up to 500GB of data. Until now, the maximum size was just 150GB. In addition, Microsoft strengthened the Azure SQL SLA and now offers developers the assurance that the service will be up 99.95 percent of the time. The company says these uptimes will be available only in the premium tier of SQL Azure and available at general availability (GA).

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The most interesting and useful addition to SQL databases on Azure for developers, however, is likely the addition of  self-service restore. With this, Azure will now automatically create backups for up to 30 days. The built-in feature of the premium tier of Azure’s SQL will be available later this month, and developers won’t have to do anything to enable it. If you’ve ever mistakenly deleted a database while you were testing something, a tool like this would have likely saved you quite a few headaches.

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In addition, Microsoft announced active geo replication for databases on Azure. This gives developers more fail-over options in case something goes wrong with their databases, similar to what Microsoft already offers for storage on Azure, too. Microsoft says geo replication for database is available only in the premium tier of Azure SQL Database, and will be available to customers later this month.

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