Azure SQL Database (V12) GA coming April 1st, 2015, Reminder Tampa SQL Saturday this weekend

New announcement from the Azure Team -

Also make sure and signup for the SQL Saturday event in Tampa this weekend Saturday Feb 28th go to: https://www.sqlsaturday.com/

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We’ve announced the general availability of the latest service version for Azure SQL Database (V12) in Asia with 25 percent more Premium performance and faster data recovery.

This service update introduces near-complete SQL Server engine compatibility, greater support for larger databases, a new S3 performance level, and 25 percent more Premium performance for the same cost.

General availability pricing will take effect for all generally available V12 regions on April 1, 2015. The following is a list of Azure regions and their current status of the V12 service version.

All new subscriptions and their subsequent databases created in the generally available regions will use the new service architecture and have access to the latest features. Customers with existing servers and databases in generally available regions may elect to upgrade and/or move their Basic, Standard, or Premium databases to the new V12 service architecture to utilize these new features in production.
Significant improvement in disaster recovery objectives
With the latest service version, we’re significantly improving our recovery point objective (RPO) and estimated recovery time (ERT) by as much as 360x. (RPO is the maximum amount of most recent data changes [time interval] the application could lose before it is fully functional after a failure. ERT is the estimated duration before the database is fully functional after a restore/failover request.)

For more information about the V12 service version for Azure SQL Database, please visit the SQL Database and latest version for SQL Database (V12) webpages, plus the SQL Server Blog.