Microsoft eats own dogfood as Bing Ads moves to Azure SQL Database

Dave W. Shanahan

In a recent post, Microsoft announced it has moved Bing Ads to Azure SQL Database “to address performance and scalability requirements.” Microsoft provided a brief case study on the problems that Bing Ads faced prior to the move and the benefits that Bing Ads will see as a result of the move to Azure SQL Database.

“With millions of Bing Ads customers, hundreds of millions campaigns, and tens of billions of keywords and ads, the Bing Ads engineering team realized they would need to find a way to provide nearly unlimited scale to keep up with customer demand. With the projection of extreme scalability demands, doing everything on-premises was no longer considered to be a practical long-term solution. Scale-up hardware solutions would not accommodate the projected required resources and cost, both in terms of engineering costs and the required hardware resources.”

Microsoft is tasting some of its own medicine by moving the Bing Ads database architecture to the Azure SQL Database. Hopefully, Bing Ads migration to the Azure SQL Database will address the problems Bing Ads faced previously. Azure SQL Database’s nearly unlimited scale for the Bing Ads campaign management system will prove to be a boon for Microsoft and its customers alike.