Announcing Microsoft Database Hub: An Incredible Pace of Innovation

Monitoring the health and performance of your database is very important.

That’s why, every year or two, Microsoft announces a brand new monitoring tool. The last couple of decades have been an amazing blur, and you would be forgiven for missing Microsoft’s rapid innovations, so let’s bring you up to speed:

• 2004 – SQL Server Health and History Tool (SQLH2) – A Windows service collecting performance counters for the SQLH2 repository. Died off in the 2008 era.
• 2005-11-07 – SSMS Activity Monitor – Built into the dashboard product, widely used despite being basically abandoned, just because it’s built in and a lot of people don’t know the problems, or that there are alternatives.
• 2007-03-30 – SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports – DMV-based reports for identifying CPU, I/O, blocking, etc. Still ships, but mostly walking dead at this point.
• 2007 – SQL Nexus – Imports collected performance data for offline analysis. Still actively developed, but never caught on with the public.
• 2008-08-06 – Management Data Warehouse (SQL Server 2008 RTM) – Scheduled performance collection, a historical repository, and built-in reports. Still technically here, but abandoned and nobody uses it because the overhead was pretty awful on launch.
• 2010-03-15 – SQL Server Utility / Utility Control Point / Utility Explorer – Centralized CPU and storage utilization monitoring. Still available in 2025, but I’ve never seen anyone use it, ever.
• 2011-05-24 – PSSDIAG/SQLdiag – Builds diagnostic collection packages for counters, traces, and custom scripts. Deprecated 2025.
• 2015-10 – Query Performance Insight for Azure SQL Database – Portal visualization of expensive queries and database resource consumption, built atop Query Store.
• 2017 – Azure SQL Analytics – OMS/Log Analytics solution for monitoring Azure SQL performance across databases. I’m not exactly sure what’s going on with this one these days.

Now, things have been different in the modern era. In the last 10 years, Microsoft’s been iterating faster than ever, taking their monitoring products through their lifecycle at breathtaking speed:

• 2017-09-25 – Intelligent Insights for Azure SQL Database – Automated monitoring and detection of database performance degradation. Separate from the later Azure Monitor SQL Insights product. It’s been (checks watch) 9 years, but the product is still in preview.
• 2021-03-17 – Azure Monitor SQL Insights – Centralized DMV-based monitoring of Azure SQL and SQL Server on Azure VMs, using a dedicated collection VM. Deprecated 2024.
• 2023-11 – Performance Dashboards for SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc – Azure portal dashboards. Still in preview 3 years later.
• 2024-03-20 – Database Watcher for Azure SQL – “a managed database monitoring solution to help our customers use Azure SQL reliably and efficiently.” Deprecated in 2026.
• 2026-03-18 – Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric (docs) – fourteenth try is the charm! Finally, unified database management and observability across the database estate. Well… when I say across the estate, I mean… you have to be using Fabric, and have the Arc agent installed on your database servers, and it only works on Microsoft databases, not Postgres or your other platforms – but all your databases are in Microsoft stuff, right? Well … not Managed Instances or SQL databases in Fabric, though, they’re not supported, and it’s not available in all regions or tenants, and there are dozens of other limitations, but yeah, other than that – unified across your whole database estate!

That’s an incredible pace of innovation! Most companies wouldn’t be able to bring out, then abandon or kill this many monitoring products in such a short period of time. I’m excited to see what the future brings.

At rapid this pace, we could see entire monitoring products announced, demo’d, and then deprecated within the time span of a single conference – or perhaps even a single keynote!