Microsoft today announced major performance improvements for its Azure SQL offering. They have doubled the write performance across all Azure SQL Database offers and also they have doubled the read performance for their Premium databases. The best part of this announcement is that these performance upgrades will be available to everyone at no extra cost and are available world-wide.
Microsoft believes that heavy OLTP workloads in Premium database with random read patterns will benefit from the increases read performance and may fit into a smaller performance tier than they are running in today. And the increase in write performance will benefit bulk inserts, heavy batched data manipulation and index maintenance operations. Customers will notice up to double the logical insert throughput or 1/2 of the previous response times.
