Google announces fully managed service on GCP for Microsoft SQL Server workloads
Google Cloud Next
Google on Wednesday announced Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server, a fully-managed service that will come to Google Cloud Platform customers later this year. The new service, announced at the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, acknowledges that Microsoft SQL Server is ubiquitous for many enterprises.
Because it's fully managed, customers using Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server won't have to worry about VM operations or tasks like backups, replication, patches and updates. They'll be able to lift and shift existing SQL Server workloads to GCP, without changing apps, and take advantage of GCP services like BigQuery for analytics.
While the fully-managed service is new, Google previously enabled customers to deploy SQL Server on Google Compute Engine with their own license or licenses purchased from Google.
Google also announced that Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now offers version 11 support. Additionally, Cloud Bigtable, Google's NoSQL key-value and wide-column database service, now offers multi-region replication.
As Google expands its own database offerings, it's also expanding its partnerships with third-party database businesses like MongoDB and DataStax.
"The goal of our platform is to be a level playing field" for first-party and third-party offerings, so "customers can choose on the merits of those solutions," Dominic Preuss, director of product management for storage and databases on GCP, told ZDNet.
Business customers, particularly large enterprises, may have database-management needs best met by Google, Preuss said -- such as requirements related to security or regulatory compliance.
"If they're very clear to us we need a first-party offering, then we'll offer it," he said.
In other news, Google announced a new archive class of Cloud Storage designed for long-term data retention. It will be available later this year at price points starting from $0.0012 per GB per month (or $1.23 per TB per month).
The new archive class is designed as an alternative to tape archives. It eliminates the need for a separate retrieval process and provides immediate, low-latency access to content.