Sitecore XP/CMS supports Microsoft Azure SQL Database service for the following setups:
Note that the Email Experience Manager supports Azure SQL database in versions 3.5 and higher.
Detailed below are the known issues when using Azure SQL Database service.
Azure SQL version compatibility
Sitecore XP supports Azure SQL Database V12.
Transient errors (transient faults)
The Sitecore SQL Server data provider retry mechanism is not optimal for handling transient faults when opening a connection to the Azure SQL Database. For more information about the transient errors (transient faults), see the Microsoft Azure website.
Upgrading older versions
Upgrading Sitecore CMS/XP versions earlier than 8.2 Initial release is not supported when using Azure SQL. It might be required to temporarily switch to an on-prem Microsoft SQL Server to perform an upgrade.
The reason is that Azure SQL Database only implements a subset of T-SQL. Even though most of the essential features of T-SQL features are available, including cursors, transactions, and triggers, some are not implemented. For more detailed information, see the Azure SQL Database Transact-SQL differences article.
This can make the system unable to run version upgrade scripts for Sitecore databases.
Active Geo-Replication
Active Geo-Replication creates readable secondary databases in the same or different data center location (region). Currently, Sitecore officially supports using a read-only database for XP 9.0 Initial release and higher. If you choose to use Azure Active Geo-Replication, you must make sure that Sitecore XP instances (that is, Content Management, Content Delivery, Processing, and Reporting), are in the stopped state until you have set the local Azure SQL Database as the Primary database. You can review an experimental option to enable active secondary here.
To read more about configuring Geo-replication in Sitecore XP 9.0 Initial release and higher, see the following:
| Note: | We do not recommend or support using the Sessions db performance boost.sql file and the Microsoft TempDB system database to optimize performance on the Azure SQL Database service as this has not been tested. |