Do I Need a Hyperscale Database?

August 8, 2022

Need more flexibility?

Do you require higher performance and availability, fastback and restore, or fast storage and compute scalability? Are you moving to the cloud to modernize your applications, or are you already using other service tiers in Azure SQL Database? If so, the Azure SQL Database based on the SQL Server Database Engine architecture may be the right fit for you. 

What is a Hyperscale Database?

A Hyperscale database is a database in SQL Database that is backed by the Hyperscale scale-out storage technology. A Hyperscale database supports up to 100 TB of data and provides high throughput, performance, and rapid scaling to adapt to the workload requirements. Connectivity, query processing, database engine features, etc., work like any other database in Azure SQL Database.

What are the differences between other models?

There are three architectural models used in Azure SQL Database, General Purpose/Standard, Hyperscale, and Business Critical/Premium. The details for each are listed below.

• General purpose/standard – Offers budget-oriented balanced compute and storage options with premium remote storage (per instance) ranging from 5 GB to 4 TB.
• Hyperscale – Ideal for most business workloads with autoscaling storage size up to 100 TB, fast vertical and horizontal compute scaling, and fast database restore.
• Business-critical/premium – OLTP applications with high transaction rates and low IO latency. Offers the highest resilience to failures and fast failovers using multiple synchronously updated replicas—super-fast local SSD storage (per instance) ranging from 5 GB to 4 TB.

All three tiers offer a choice of geo-redundant, zone-redundant, or locally redundant backup storage, with a 1 to 35-day retention (the default is seven days).

What are the Main Benefits of Hyperscale?

No limits

Hyperscale removes many of the practical limits traditionally seen in cloud databases. Where most other databases are limited by the resources available in a single node, databases in the Hyperscale have no such limitations. With its flexible storage architecture, storage grows as needed. Hyperscale databases aren’t created with defined maximum sizes. A Hyperscale database grows as required – and you’re billed only for the capacity you use. For read-intensive workloads, Hyperscale provides rapid scale-out by provisioning additional replicas as needed for offloading read workloads.

Scalability

The time required to create database backups or to scale up or down is no longer tied to the volume of data in the database. Hyperscale databases can be backed up virtually instantaneously. You can also scale a database in the tens of terabytes up or down in minutes. This capability frees you from concerns about being boxed in by your initial configuration choices.

Need More Information?

Although hyper-scale offers many benefits, it may not be the best fit for your organization. Hyperscale is particularly advantageous to you in the following scenarios:

• If you have a sizeable on-premises database and want to modernize applications by moving them to the cloud
• If you’re running databases in Azure but are limited by the database size restrictions of the other service tiers
• Smaller databases require fast compute scaling, high performance, instant backup, and fast database restoration

If you need help in determining which model is best for you, general advice on moving to the cloud, or making sure you are getting the most value out of the cloud, Dewpoint is here to help.