While the previous section showed several clear Azure deployments of SQL Server, SQL Server is traditionally hosted on-premise. As the data contention grows over time, administrators face a challenge of handling the increased storage space needed for data or for backups as well as with RTO and RPO objectives.
Migration to Azure environment is not always easy or possible at all. That's why Microsoft incorporated many enhancements to SQL Server to help DBAs to succeed when challenging mentioned situations. In the following sections, we will go through these enhancements and show how to use them. Every section contains appropriate situations for using them, and also a detailed description of the implementation.
The first described feature was introduced in SQL Server 2016, continues in SQL Server 2017, and it is called StretchDB...