SQL Server’s data resiliency story gets a boost thanks to the new “link feature” in Azure SQL Managed Instance. According to Kumar’s post, the link feature includes a built-in Distributed Availability ...

One of the early adoptions was Microsoft's Automatic Tuning feature in Azure SQL, which uses machine learning under the hood. This service continuously monitors query performance and automatically ...

So SQL Machine Learning Services are available? R and Python support, through external procedure support, are included in the product, just as in SQL Server.

Native integration with Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Active Directory and Power BI simplifies the creation of modern data warehouses that enable organizations to ...

Azure SQL Database Edge, now in private preview, runs on ARM and x64 processors and puts a lightweight database engine that supports the same SQL queries as SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

But it was SQL Server’s new machine learning tools that grabbed my attention. Machine learning remains one of Microsoft’s big themes for 2017, and it’s an important segment of SQL Server 2017.

Azure Machine Learning supports five environments for model development: Azure Notebooks, the Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM), Jupyter Notebooks, Visual Studio Code, and Azure Databricks.

It also has big data baked in with support for Spark and Hadoop. SQL Server 2019 can, unsurprisingly, run on-prem, on Azure Stack, or in the cloud.