Alternate ways of scaling SQL Managed Instance

We have seen the steps for scaling up SQL Managed Instance resources with management operations. Here, we will be learning more about alternate ways to scale a managed instance.

The Business Critical service tier of SQL Managed Instance comes with an in-built read replica and that can be used as a read-only source for your analytics application. An internal read replica in Business Critical SQL Managed Instance runs with the same compute and storage resources similar to its primary node and it can help in off-loading a read-only workload without paying more for extra resources. The internal read-replica server is not visible on the Azure portal and hence needs to be accessed using the ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly flag.

The following is the high-level architecture for offloading a read-only workload to the internal read replica in the Business Critical service tier:

Figure 7.66: Read scale-out architecture...