Davide Mauri - Practical Azure SQL Database for Modern Developers: Building Applications in the Microsoft Cloud

Davide Mauri , Silvano Coriani , Anna Hoffman , Sanjay Mishra and Jovan Popovic

Practical Azure SQL Database for Modern Developers

Building Applications in the Microsoft Cloud

1st ed.

This book was written during one of the most difficult times faced by our generation the COVID-19 epidemic that took lives of thousands of people across the world and impacted many other lives in several different ways; and the events leading to the #Whatmatters2020 movement.

What we need more is kindness and compassion toward different ideas, different points of view, and different experiences as in those lies the road to progress.

This book is dedicated to the spirit of kindness and compassion in every living being, which we need in abundance to get through these difficult times.

Today, embracing digital transformation and cloud computing is key to customer success. There is a critical need for organizations and technologies to evolve to meet new business requirements (and shifting priorities in response to the current COVID crisis) and new data ecosystems. Azure SQL Database has been a central technology in this evolution, and modern developers need to keep suit. If youre an experienced database software engineer or a modern developer looking to upskill your knowledge and technical intensity in this space, this book is for you.

With over 30 years experience in the tech industry focused on customers and digital transformation, Im thrilled to see this work come to fruition. With the benefit of hindsight, its not surprising that there has been tremendous evolution and growth in the database space over the last 2530 years.

I joined Microsoft in July 1993 to help build a Microsoft database business. Microsoft SQL Server on Windows Server (then called Windows NT 3.1) had just released. At that time, we had only 17 Microsoft SQL Server software engineers. Today there are more than 2300. In 2000, I moved into the product group to establish one of the first highly technical, customer-facing teams within engineering at Microsoft, called SQLCAT SQL Customer Advisory Team. The team was super technical and interacted directly with our top customers around the world. Our engineers listened and learned from these customers. They then took these learnings and drove customer feedback, feature suggestions, and bug reports into important product improvements and created best-practice guidance and made it available to all customers, large and small. In 2011, the SQLCAT team became AzureCAT and focused on helping our customers accelerate their journey to the cloud.

Microsoft SQL Server evolved significantly over the past 25+ years. We saw the creation of new enhancements and capabilities to the SQL platform such as Graph, Geospatial, JSON, columnstore compression, memory-optimized tables, temporal tables, and more. Its most significant evolution came as Microsoft evolved on-premise computing and storage services to the cloud, when SQL Server became the foundation for the cloud-based Azure SQL offerings like Azure SQL DB, SQL MI, and much, much more. The developer experience for SQL Server has really evolved and today supports all of the popular languages: Python, Node.js, Go, Ruby, PHP, Java, Native C/C++, and of course .NET languages C#, F#, and so on.