Azure SQL Database Adds Change Data Capture

Azure SQL Database adds change data capture (CDC) capabilities that can help customers use the service for more complex enterprise applications and brings the service closer to SQL Server parity. SQL Database is a multitenant relational database management cloud service, based on SQL Server’s latest database engine, for individual database deployments. CDC is a SQL Server feature that automates the logging of changes to a database so the changes can be processed and analyzed as they happen, reducing the need to create custom code to query and evaluate data changes. CDC records activities (insert, update, and delete) and records the before and after values in corresponding change tables. The changes can be queried for auditing or analysis to understand what data has changed or used with an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool as a method for updating data warehouses and data marts with incremental data changes to a production database, improving ETL performance and efficiency, and potentially lowering costs. CDC is available in most performance tiers but creates new tables and therefore consumes more storage. Azure SQL Database is discussed in the Azure Roadmap at https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/roadmap/ref/sql-database.