When columnstore indexes appeared in SQL Server 2012, they were great, an improvement up to 10X could be experienced on data warehouse queries, some could describe this as a index running from a memory structure… but they had a limitation, they were not updateable, every time you wanted to do a data load you needed to plan and rebuild your index as well. There are some restrictions on clustered and nonclustered indexes, but now the index will be updatable and easier to maintain.

This is the Ultimate backup tool for dummies or a very smart backup tool? make your choice, the idea behind this feature is to avoid all the scripting, automation and human error that is mixed in the backup solutions. When setting up backup strategies companies often realize too late that their setup was not the correct one for them, resulting on data loss, lack of recovery power, impact on revenue, so on. So with Managed Backups to Azure you only need to specify 2 variables:

1-Retention Period: how long you want to keep your backups

2-Backup location in Azure(normally in the form of a URL)

The rest is completely automatic. This feature will be smart enough to tell if you need full backups, differential or transaction log backups and how often you need them, based on your data load and database configuration. Backups will be stored in the cloud and you will have guarantee of point in time recovery.(again depending on your setup)

5- Azure VMs for Availability replicas

SQL Server 2014 will allow you to define an Availability Group replica that lives inside Azure. For this scenario fail over needs to be manual, but MS guarantees fast recovery. As long as your primary is up and running, you cans still run your reports from the Azure replica, to gain some performance by running complex queries outside production environment. This will give folks an easy to setup HA solution without the complexity of cost of ownership, and also avoid the stress of setting up an on premise physical solution.