Microsoft has worked a lot in the past few years on their Mobile First, Cloud First strategy. We have seen a huge investment in their cloud offering, Azure, with the line between on-premises IT and cloud-based IT being continually blurred. The features being released in the newest products from Microsoft continue this approach and SQL Server is taking steps to bridge the divide between running SQL Server as a fully on-premises solution and storing/processing relational data in the cloud. One big step in achieving this approach is the new Stretch Database feature with SQL Server 2016. Stretch Database allows a DBA to categorize the data inside a database, defining which data is hot and which is cold. This categorization allows Stretch Database to then move the cold data out of the on-premises database and into Azure Cloud Storage. The segmentation of data remains transparent to any user/application that queries the data, which now resides in two different locations. The idea behind this technology is to reduce storage requirements for the on-premises system by offloading large amounts of archive data onto cheaper, slower storage in the cloud.

This reduction should then allow the smaller hot data to be placed on smaller capacity, higher performance storage. The magic of Stretch Database is the fact that this separation of data requires no changes at the application or database query level. This is a purely storage-level change, which means the potential ROI of segmenting a database is quite large.