The Ultimate Freedom of Movement – SQL Server 2022 and Managed Instance

Dani Ljepava, Niko Neugebauer

In this session, we’ll deep-dive into the link feature, a revolutionary new hybrid capability bridging the SQL Server and Managed Instance that provides the ultimate freedom of movement between the two.

The feature provides never-before-possible hybrid connectivity and near real-time database replication between SQL Servers 2016-2022 and Managed Instance, including the industry’s first bidirectional data movement and online failover (Disaster Recovery) between SQL Server 2022 and SQL Managed Instance.

You don’t even need to migrate to the cloud to use it – remain running on your existing SQL Server and use the modern Azure services by offloading R/O workloads and analytics to the cloud. When ready to migrate, use it as the best possible minimum downtime migration option in Azure.

Need to move back from Azure to SQL Server on-premises, or anywhere else? No problem, use it all in reverse and replicate your online and in near real-time from Managed Instance back to SQL Server 2022.

Embark with us on the innovation journey and hear directly from the Microsoft SQL engineering product group on how we’ve started this as an internal project codename Chimera to what became the link feature.