The Hyperscale service tier in Azure SQL Database is the newest service tier in the vCore-based purchasing model. This service tier is a highly scalable storage and compute performance tier that leverages the Azure architecture to scale out the storage and compute resources for an Azure SQL Database substantially beyond the limits available for the General Purpose and Business Critical service tiers.
The Hyperscale service tier in Azure SQL Database provides the following additional capabilities:
- Support for up to 100 TB of database size
- Nearly instantaneous database backups (based on file snapshots stored in Azure Blob storage) regardless of size with no IO impact on compute resources
- Fast database restores (based on file snapshots) in minutes rather than hours or days (not a size of data operation)
- Higher overall performance due to higher log throughput and faster transaction commit times regardless of data volumes
- Rapid scale out – you can provision one or more read-only nodes for offloading your read workload and for use as hot-standbys
- Rapid Scale up – you can, in constant time, scale up your compute resources to accommodate heavy workloads as and when needed, and then scale the compute resources back down when not needed.
Who should consider the Hyperscale service tier
The Hyperscale service tier is primarily intended for customers who have large databases either on-premises and want to modernize their applications by moving to the cloud or for customers who are already in the cloud and are limited by the maximum database size restrictions (1-4 TB). It is also intended for customers who seek high performance and high scalability for storage and compute.
The Hyperscale service tier supports all SQL Server workloads, but it is primarily optimized for OLTP. The Hyperscale service tier also supports hybrid and analytical (data mart) workloads.
Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-database-service-tier-hyperscale
