Challenges in Evolving a Successful Database Product (SQL Server) to a Cloud Service (SQL Azure)

Speakers: Hanuma Kodavalla (Azure Database Group), Phil Bernstein
Host: Phil Bernstein

Over the past few years, my team at Microsoft worked on evolving our very successful on-prem database product, SQL Server, to a Database Platform as a Service, SQL Azure, running in the cloud managing millions of databases in many regions globally. Mission-critical services offered by Microsoft as well as by customers worldwide in diverse industries depend on SQL Azure. I’ll describe the problems we faced in evolving a mature on-prem product to cloud supporting from very small to very large databases with guaranteed SLAs, various improvements in the areas of elasticity, high availability, recovery, security and query processing, and software engineering challenges in deploying changes to a complex codebase made by hundreds of engineers to live systems. Bio: Hanuma Kodavalla is a Technical Fellow in the Azure Databases group at Microsoft where he has been for twenty years. He previously worked at Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation, Oracle, Sybase and Asera. For more than three decades, Hanuma worked on many aspects of Relational Database Systems and has been instrumental in architecting multiple commercial database systems for high performance and high availability. Hanuma received BTech in Electronics and Communications in 1981 from National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India, MTech in Computer Science in 1983 from Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India, and MS in Computer Science in 1988 from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He has a few publications in database conferences and many patents related to novel implementation techniques for online transaction processing and data warehousing in the areas of concurrency control, recovery, high-availability, query processing and security