Today, I am excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. The GA milestone means that, starting today, these services are bringing the community versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL with built-in high availability, a 99.99% availability SLA, elastic scaling for performance, and industry leading security and compliance to Azure.

Since we started the preview of MySQL and PostgreSQL on Azure in May 2017, we have accomplished a lot, increasing compute scale up to 32 vCores, offering a new Memory Optimized tier, ability to scale storage on-line independent of compute without impact to application performance, allowing greater flexibility in backup storage options, and achieving industry compliance with ISO, SOC, and HIPAA. We will be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when enforcement begins on May 25, 2018. In addition, with availability in 22 regions worldwide, these services are truly global. The reach of the services remains a key focus for us, and we continue to work on providing availability across all 40+ Azure regions, which we expect to deliver in coming months. In the video below, my colleague Sunil Kamath shares some of the key benefits of adopting Azure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL.

“Azure Database for PostgreSQL service is what we had really expected. The flexibility of this service will allow us to deliver many more applications to our customers.”

Tatsuya Sugai, Corporate Officer and CIO, Nihon Unisys, Ltd

For me personally, the most rewarding aspect of being involved with building these services have been working with the people across the open source community and the Azure teams at Microsoft. With our team spread across the US, China, Canada, Germany, Serbia, and Israel, and the open source community being truly global, this experience has given me a deep appreciation for what can be achieved when a diverse set of people work together. I am inspired by the direction that Microsoft is taking, with an emphasis on the fundamental of openness, working with the community, and a dedication to supporting our customers where they are, whether on-premises or in Azure.

As I mentioned in my November 15th blog post, we remain committed to working with the community on the changes that we make to the database engines offered in these Azure services. To further this goal, we joined the MariaDB Foundation in November 2017 because of our belief that the foundation is important to ensuring that MariaDB remains open and is an inspiration to other projects. MariaDB is the next database service that our team is working on launching on Azure, so watch for it in coming few months, or submit a nomination to participate in the limited preview of the service. It is important to us that Azure database services for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and soon MariaDB represent the community versions of these databases. In this way, we can deliver a consistent customer experience, whether a database is running on Azure, on a laptop during application development, or on-premises.

The delivery of these services is only possible by leveraging existing innovation in Azure. Our MySQL and PostgreSQL services are managed using the fabric and infrastructure that our SQL Server-based database service, Azure SQL Database, has been built on since 2010. Over the years, Azure SQL Database has been the industry leader in providing a truly automated database service experience with key innovations such as automatic threat detection, database workload insights, and automatic performance tuning. Because Azure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL are built using the same foundation, we can provide a similarly great experience.

As we improve and add database services in the future, we will continue to build on the innovation provided across Azure and SQL Server.

Finally, though you can continue using existing tools such as mysqldump and pg_dump for migrating databases to Azure, we are enabling a completely seamless migration experience with the Azure Database Migration Service (DMS). With DMS, you can perform migrations with minimum application downtime, which allows the source database to remain fully operational during the migration. Today we are also announcing a limited preview of DMS support for migrations from MySQL to Azure Database for MySQL, with support for PostgreSQL migrations to follow. If you are interested in participating in this limited preview of DMS support for MySQL migrations, be sure to submit a nomination.

If you are currently working with one of these database services, you might find the following links useful:

Azure Database for MySQL Documentation Feedback forum

Azure Database for PostgreSQL Documentation Feedback forum



If you’d like to try out one of these newly released database services, you can get started here:

I hope that you enjoy working with our latest generally available database services. Be sure to let us know what you think through User Voice PostgreSQL and MySQL!