In today’s data-driven world, driving digital transformation increasingly depends on our ability to manage massive amounts of data and harness its potential. Developers who are building intelligent and immersive applications should not have to be constrained by resource limitations that ultimately impact their customers’ experience.

Unfortunately, resource limits are an inescapable reality for application developers. Almost every developer can recall a time of when database compute, storage and memory limitations impacted an application’s performance. The consequences are real; from the time and cost spent compensating for platform limitations, to higher latency of usability, and even downtime associated with large data operations.

We have already broken limits on NoSQL with Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed multi-model database with multi-master replication. We have also delivered blazing performance at incredible value with Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Today, we are excited to deliver a high-performance scaling capability for applications using the relational model, Hyperscale, which further removes limits for application developers.

Hyperscale Explained

Hyperscale is a new cloud-native solution purpose-built to address common cloud scalability limits with either compute, storage, memory or combinations of all three. Best of all, you can harness Hyperscale without rearchitecting your application. The technology implementation of Hyperscale is optimized for different scenarios and customized by database engine.

Announcing:

Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale

Hyperscale (powered by Citus Data technology) brings high-performance scaling to PostgreSQL database workloads by horizontally scaling a single database across hundreds of nodes to deliver blazingly fast performance and scale. This allows more data to fit in-memory, parallelize queries across hundreds of nodes, and index data faster. This enables developers to satisfy workload scenarios that require ingesting and querying data in real-time, with sub-second response times, at any scale – even with billions of rows. The addition of Hyperscale as a deployment option for Azure Database for PostgreSQL simplifies infrastructure and application design, saving time to focus on business needs. Hyperscale is compatible with the latest innovations, versions and tools of PostgreSQL, so you can leverage your existing PostgreSQL expertise.

Also, the Citus extension is available as an open source download on GitHub. We are committed to partnering with the PostgreSQL community on staying current with the latest releases so developers can stay productive.

Use Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale for low latency, high-throughput scenarios like:

Developing real-time operational analytics

Enabling multi-tenant SaaS applications

Building transactional applications

Learn more about Hyperscale on Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is powered by a highly scalable storage architecture that enables a database to grow as needed, effectively eliminating the need to pre-provision storage resources. Scale compute and storage resources independently, providing flexibility to optimize performance for workloads. The time required to restore a database or to scale up or down is no longer tied to the volume of data in the database and database backups are virtually instantaneous. With read-intensive workloads, Hyperscale provides rapid scale-out by provisioning additional read replicas as needed for offloading read workloads.

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale joins the General Purpose and Business Critical service tiers, which are configured to serve a spectrum of workloads.

General Purpose - offers balanced compute and storage, and is ideal for most business workloads with up to 8 TB of storage.

- offers balanced compute and storage, and is ideal for most business workloads with up to 8 TB of storage. Business Critical - optimized for data applications with fast IO and high availability requirements with up to 4 TB of storage.

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is optimized for OLTP and high throughput analytics workloads with storage up to 100TB. Satisfy highly scalable storage and read-scale requirements and migrate large on-premises workloads and data marts running on symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) databases. Azure SQL Database Hyperscale significantly expands the potential for application growth without being limited by storage size.

Learn more about Azure SQL Database Hyperscale.

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is not the only SQL innovation we are announcing today! Azure SQL Database is also introducing a new serverless compute option: Azure SQL Database serverless. This new option allows compute and memory to scale independently based on the workload requirements. Compute is automatically paused and resumed, eliminating the requirements of managing capacity and reducing cost. Azure SQL Database serverless is a fantastic option for applications with unpredictable or intermittent compute requirements.

Learn more about Azure SQL Database serverless.

Build applications in a familiar environment with tools you know

Azure relational databases share more than Hyperscale. They are built upon the same platform, with innovations like intelligence and security shared across the databases so you can be most productive in the engine of your choice.

Trained on millions of databases over the years, these intelligent features:

Inspect databases to understand the workloads

Identify bottlenecks

Automatically recommend options to optimize application performance

Intelligence also extends to security features like:

Advanced threat protection that continuously monitors for suspicious activities

Providing immediate security alerts on potential vulnerabilities

Recommending actions on how to investigate and mitigate threats

Because we do not rely upon forked versions of our engines, you can confidently develop in a familiar environment with the tools you are used to – and rest assured that your hyperscaled database is always compatible and in-sync with the latest SQL and PostgreSQL versions.

Ready to break the limits?

Hyperscale enables you to develop highly scalable, analytical applications, and low latency experiences using your existing skills on both Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. With Hyperscale on Azure databases, your applications will be able to go beyond the traditional limits of the database and unleash high performance scaling. We can’t wait to see what you will create with us.