Microsoft Azure SQL

Development Services

The Microsoft Azure SQL Database a highly developed, fully managed relational cloud database service that provides the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility, so you can migrate your SQL Server databases without changing your apps. Accelerate app development and make maintenance easy and productive using the SQL tools popular with developers. Take advantage of built-in intelligence that learns application patterns and adapts to maximize performance, reliability, and data protection.

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If you need answers to questions or your database is crashing:
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Migrate your SQL Server databases without changing your apps

SQL Database Managed Instance provides the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility and native virtual network (VNET) support so you can migrate your SQL Server databases to SQL Database Managed Instance without changing your apps. With Managed Instance, you can combine the rich SQL Server surface area with the operational and financial benefits of an intelligent, fully managed service. Managed Instance is your best destination when migrating a large number of existing SQL Server databases from on-premises or virtual machines to SQL Database.

Tune and protect your database with built-in intelligence

Secure your app data and ensure availability

Build security-enhanced apps in the cloud with advanced built-in protection and security features that dynamically mask sensitive data and encrypt it at rest and in motion. Ensure high availability with three hot replicas and built-in automatic failover that guarantees a 99.99% availability SLA. Accelerate recovery from catastrophic failures and regional outages to an RPO of less than five seconds with active-geo replication. With physical and operational security, SQL Database helps you meet the most stringent regulatory compliances, such as ISO/IEC 27001/27002, Fed RAMP/FISMA, SOC, HIPPA, and PCI DSS.

Optimize performance for your workloads

When demand for your app grows from a handful of devices and customers to millions, SQL Database scales on the fly with minimal downtime. Additionally, SQL Database provides in-memory OLTP that improves throughput and latency on transactional processing workloads up to 30 times over traditional table and database engines, and delivers faster business insights with up to 100 times faster queries and reports over traditional row-oriented storage.

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If you need answers to questions or your database is crashing:
CALL US AT (323) 285-0939 or use our Contact Us email form.

Work in your preferred development environment

SQL Database allows you to focus on what you do best—building great apps. Seamlessly enable DevOps by developing in SQL Server containers and deploying in SQL Database with the easy-to-use tools you already have, such as Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio. Or, build your applications with Python, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and .NET on the MacOS, Linux, and Windows platforms, and deliver with the speed and efficiency your business demands.

Build multitenant apps with customer isolation and efficiency

If you're a software as a service (SaaS) app developer writing a multitenant app that serves many customers, you often have to make tradeoffs in customer performance, efficiencies, and security. SQL Database removes the compromise, and helps you maximize your resource utilization and manage thousands of databases as one, while ensuring one-customer-per-database with elastic pools.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help your organization meet your business challenges. It's the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.

It's the cloud for all

We believe that the success made possible by the cloud must be accessible to every business and every organization—small and large, old and new.

Productive

Reduce time to market, by delivering features faster with over 100 end-to-end services.

Hybrid

Develop and deploy where you want, with the only consistent hybrid cloud on the market. Extend Azure on-premises with Azure Stack.

Intelligent

Create intelligent apps using powerful data and artificial intelligence services.

Trusted

Join startups, governments, and 90 percent of Fortune 500 businesses who run on the Microsoft Cloud today.

What Is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure. This cloud computing service is a big part of Microsoft's business, and it competes with similar services from Amazon and Google.

Got Questions Or Need Help Now?

If you need answers to questions or your database is crashing:
CALL US AT (323) 285-0939 or use our Contact Us email form.

What is Cloud Computing?

By "cloud computing", we don't mean the vague term that's often applied to consumer services that store your data on a remote server somewhere. We mean actual computing as a service for companies, organizations, and even individuals who want to take advantage of it.

Traditionally, businesses and other organizations would host their own infrastructure. A business would have its own web server (or email server, or whatever) on its own hardware. If more power was needed, the business would have to purchase more server hardware. The business would also have to pay someone to administrate that hardware and pay for a solid Internet connection to serve its customers. Alternatively, there are hosting companies that host your services on some of their own hardware in their data centers, for a fee.

Cloud computing works a bit differently. Rather than run your own hardware or pay for use of some specific hardware in someone else's data center, you just pay for access to a massive pool of computing resources provided by Microsoft (or Amazon, or Google). This allows you to host web servers, email servers, databases, file storage servers, virtual machines, user directories, or anything else you might want.

When you need more computing resources, you don't have to purchase physical hardware. The "cloud" shares the hardware and automatically assigns the work, as necessary. You pay for as many computing resources as you need, and not a specific number of hardware servers on a rack somewhere. Services you deploy in this way can either be public servers available to everyone, or part of a "private cloud" that's just used in an organization.

Why Use Azure?

There's a much smaller up-front cost when using cloud computing. You don't have to invest a bunch of money into creating your own data center, purchasing hardware for it, and paying a staff. There's no risk of overpaying for too much hardware—or buying too little and not having what you need.

Instead, you host whatever you need to host "in the cloud" provided by a service like Microsoft Azure. You pay for only the computing resources you use, as you use them. If you need more, it can instantly scale up to handle high demand. If you need less, you aren't paying for more than you need.

Everything from a company's internal email system to public-facing websites and services for mobile apps are increasingly hosted on cloud platforms for this reason.

What Can Microsoft Azure Do?

The Microsoft Azure website provides a directory of hundreds of different services you can use, including full virtual machines, databases, file storage, backups, and services for mobile and web apps.

This service was originally named "Windows Azure", but transitioned to "Microsoft Azure" because it can handle much more than just Windows. You can run either Windows or Linux virtual machines on Azure, for example—whichever you prefer.

Digging through these hundreds of services, you'll see that you can do practically anything. And for anything Azure doesn't offer in an easy service, you can set up a Windows or Linux virtual machine that hosts whatever software you want to use. You could even host a Windows or Linux desktop in the cloud on a virtual machine and connect to it remotely. It's just another way to use remote computing resources.

Much of what Azure does isn't exclusive to Azure. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are competing. Amazon Web Services, for example, is the leader in the field—ahead of both Microsoft and Google offerings.

Microsoft is also using Azure to extend Windows in some important ways. Traditionally, organizations that wanted to have a central user directory and management of their PCs needed to run their own Microsoft Active Directory server. Now, in addition to the traditional Active Directory software that can be installed on a Windows server, an organization can use Azure Active Directory.

Azure AD is the same sort of thing—but hosted on Microsoft Azure. It allows organizations to have all those centralized administration features without requiring them to host their own Active Directory server (and set up the often complicated infrastructure and access permissions needed to make it work remotely).

These services aren't identical, but Microsoft is clearly betting that Azure AD is the future. Windows 10 users can join an Azure Active Directory via the "Work Access" feature, and Microsoft's Office 365 service uses Azure Active Directory to authenticate users.

Anyone Can Use Azure!

Anyone can use Microsoft Azure. Just head to the Azure website and you'll can sign up for a new account. Each account comes with $200 in credit that you can use over the first 30 days, so you'll be able to get started and see how Azure works for you. You also get a certain number of free services for the first year, including access to Linux virtual machines, Windows virtual machines, file storage, databases, and bandwidth.

Of course, all of this is really useful to people and organizations who want to host services or develop applications. If you're just a Windows user—or a user of any other platform—you don't need to use this stuff. But the developers who create and host your applications often use services like Azure. And if you own a company, you might be able to save some money (and some headaches) by letting Azure handle your infrastructure.

Got Questions Or Need Help Now?

If you need answers to questions or your database is not working for you
CALL US AT: (323) 285-0939 or use our Contact Us email form.

Microsoft Azure SQL

Microsoft Azure SQL