Microsoft's Azure SQL Database-as-a-Service Improvements Highlighted at Pass Summit 2014

This morning at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Summit, Microsoft execs, T.K. Rengarajan, James Phillips, and Joseph Sirosh, took the stage to kick off the event in the opening keynote. Microsoft's investments in the Cloud have been clearly defined over the past couple months through other recent events, but little additional information has been provided for the company's overall SQL Server plans. SQL Server and Azure SQL, of course, is the linchpin for Microsoft's Cloud strategy and actually touches almost every aspect of its public and preview services.

Microsoft considers data as the Cloud currency, evidenced in some of its newer services like Machine Learning and BI. So, amid the normal litany of company and product boasts, the keynote crew made some moderately significant announcements around SQL Server.

Here's the short of it:

The updates for Azure SQL Database will show up later this year (before the year is out), and the opportunity to start testing Azure Machine Learning is available now.

Learn more about Azure SQL: SQL Database

Learn more about Machine Learning: Machine Learning