Microsoft has made some big announcements regarding its Azure database product portfolio at its Build developer conference.
The company has had a strong portfolio in the area for a number of years but Microsoft now really seems to be upping its game with the launch of Cosmos DB and the Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL.
First off, this is Microsoft making a broad play for developers, the more options it offers the more likely it is to bring developers on-board, at least that’s the theory.
Oracle has long held the top position in the database market and Microsoft has long looked on with envious eyes.
Cosmos DB could be a real diamond for Microsoft that helps it to finally overtake Big Red.
Dubbed a “planet-scale” distributed database service, it is a superset of the existing NoSQL DocumentDB service, and the company will move all of the existing DocumentDB customers and their data to Cosmos DB – for free.
The schema-free, multi-model database is capable of supporting key-value, documents, graphs, columnar data, and various APIs to access data from the likes of MongoDB.
The Cosmos DB announcement is the big bang release from the first day of Microsoft Build, but the Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL might just be the one that has developers more interested.
The move basically makes it possible for developers to use some of the most popular databases on Azure. The company’s announcement means that customers will no longer have to spin up VMs to run and operate the likes of PostgreSQL.
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Microsoft already offers Azure SQL, but this move means that Microsoft is making itself a lot more open to the MySQL offering, seeing as these two offerings aren’t exactly like for like.
For those that don’t think that Microsoft is gunning for Oracle, well the Redmond company also launched a migration service that allows developers to take third-party and SQL Server databases to the Azure SQL Database – with Big Red being one of those third-party vendors.
If you’ve been following the cloud database market then you will remember that in 2015 Amazon Web Services launched a database migration service. This has been a big hit for AWS, with 23,000 databases said to have been moved into AWS using the tool.
Microsoft will no doubt be hoping it can replicate this success and surpass it.
