There are lots of other reasons for using Azure SQL Database. These include the following:

• Scalability: Azure SQL Database can be scaled according to your needs and usage. More information about this topic will be covered later in the chapter.
• Online scaling: No downtime is needed to scale your database size. For example, you can start your application with a size that fits it in the beginning, and Azure SQL Database can respond to the database's requirements by scaling whenever necessary without causing any downtime.
• Hardcore monitoring: Azure SQL Database provides built-in monitoring and alerting tools that can be used to identify potential problems and even recommend actions to be taken in order to fix an issue. Alerts can also be generated based on the monitoring metrics, so you can receive an alert that something has gone wrong according to the monitoring baseline that the user can define according to his needs.
• Built-in intelligence: One of the coolest features of Azure SQL Database is built-in intelligence. It helps to reduce the costs involved in running databases and increases the performance of the application that uses Azure SQL Database as a backend.
• Intelligent threat detection: This feature utilizes SQL Database auditing in order to detect any harmful attempts to access data. It simply provides alerts for any abnormal behaviors.
• High availability: Microsoft provides many ways to ensure that Azure SQL Database is highly available:
  • Automatic backup: To avoid any issues that might cause data loss, automatic backups are performed on SQL Databases (these include full, differential, and transaction log backups).
  • Point in time restores: Azure SQL Database can be recovered to any point-in-time within the automatic backup retention period.
  • Active geo-replication: If you have an application that needs to be accessed from across the globe, you can use active geo-replication to avoid facing a high load on the original SQL Database. Azure geo-replication will create four secondary databases for the original database, with read access.
  • Failover groups: This feature is designed to help customers to recover from databases in secondary regions if a disaster occurs in the region that the original database is stored in.

This is a sneak peek of Azure SQL Database's most common features.