I’m presenting a session this weekend at SQL Saturday Manchester on how to deal with lack of SQL agent when moving to Azure SQL. This session looks at options in Azure for running regular jobs against SQL databases and usually focusses on using Azure Automation and Azure functions. However, just a couple of weeks before the event Microsoft released a new service that could also be used to fill this gap, SQL Elastic Jobs, and so I needed to squeeze that into my presentation last minute.
It didn’t make it into todays Ignite Keynote, but today Microsoft released a preview of a new Azure service, Service Endpoints. It is now possible to take Azure services that have previously only had public endpoints, and restrict these to only allow access from a specific virtual network (or multiple networks), or even specific subnets.
This preview is starting out with Azure SQL and Storage, with more services to come along soon.
Microsoft recently announced a preview of SQL Azure Elastic Database Pools. This new service allows you to create a pool of database that share the same underlying resource. This is likely to be especially useful for SaaS providers where clients are often separated by database, but don’t require all of the throughput and storage provided by a single Azure database. Using elastic database pools you can create a pool of specified resource and place your databases into it.
