The company's Transparent Data Encryption option, borrowed from SQL Server, is now generally available as part of numerous upgrades to its cloud database platform.

Microsoft introduced transparent data encryption (TDE) when it released SQL Server 2008, adding full database encryption rather than the limited cell-based encryption that debuted in SQL Server 2005.

Microsoft has detailed a couple of improvements to the way Azure SQL Database handles failovers in case of an outage. It works with individual databases, elastic pools, or a combination of both.