Over the past year, it’s become clear that businesses navigating these unprecedented times require a new level of agility. Core to this agility is achieving a level of software development excellence that was once thought unimaginable. When it comes to empowering all developers with limitless scale, choice, and possibilities, Microsoft Azure has their back.

Our commitment to developers is to make Azure the best cloud for developing intelligent applications that harness the power of data and AI. At Microsoft Build, we are announcing several exciting new capabilities and offers that make it easy and cost-effective for developers to get started with Azure data and AI services.

Innovate with Azure database services

We are announcing several new capabilities that empower developers to innovate with Azure’s database services. Azure SQL Database’s ledger capability, in preview, provides cryptographic verification for sensitive records. Customers like British Petroleum are already benefiting from this exciting feature. Azure Synapse Link for Microsoft Dataverse provides immediate insights from Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform applications, while Microsoft Power BI streaming dataflows remove any bottleneck from signals to insights. There are also several updates to Azure Cosmos DB to help developers build and modernize high-performance applications at any scale,

The past several months have seen their share of hardship, but despite the challenges, organizations continue to see digital transformation in the cloud as a path to growth. The promises of accelerated innovation, efficient operations, and lower costs among others, have helped many businesses remain viable—if not thrive—and they’re now looking at how they can do even more.

“We can do more now because our small team offloads all the heavy lifting to Azure. We can ship more features and ultimately give customers a faster, more secure, more feature-rich product.”—Paul Hill, Principal Cloud Architect, Schneider Electric

Back in October, we held our first digital event for Azure SQL, where customers learned how to boost scalability and resiliency by migrating their mission-critical SQL Server workloads onto Azure SQL. The event was successful and left many ready to take the next steps to continue their transformation journey and innovate in the cloud.

To help with this next step, we are hosting the Azure SQL digital event: Innovate Today with Azure SQL on May 4, 10:00 AM Pacific Time. During this hour-long virtual event, you’ll join Rohan Kumar, Corporate Vice President Azure Data, and a full team of Azure SQL experts to