For us there's been two major motivations, and another few lesser.
First and most prominent is that Sybase was bought by SAP and SAP has pivoted SQLAnywhere from a general RMDBS to focus on mobile applications (ie more embedded). Apart from product development changing focus we've struggled to buy licenses for our customers, so the writing on the wall was clear.
The seconds is that we've got some big customers who run their own MSSQL servers, and they've been pushing harder and harder for us to use their servers so they can handle administration and access control directly.
A third motivation is that while we've been primarily on-prem, a lot of customers these days don't want that, so we've started offering cloud hosted options. Since we're a Windows shop Azure made sense, and as such the hosted MSSQL also makes sense and is quite convenient.
Fourth is that, while MSSQL is quite anemic in terms of SQL language functionality, it does support transactional schema updates, which makes schema upgrades much less error prone.
Given that MSSQL syntax support is quite limited and we now have developed tooling and library support for multiple databases, we'll probably also add support for PostgreSQL later.
First and most prominent is that Sybase was bought by SAP and SAP has pivoted SQLAnywhere from a general RMDBS to focus on mobile applications (ie more embedded). Apart from product development changing focus we've struggled to buy licenses for our customers, so the writing on the wall was clear.
The seconds is that we've got some big customers who run their own MSSQL servers, and they've been pushing harder and harder for us to use their servers so they can handle administration and access control directly.
A third motivation is that while we've been primarily on-prem, a lot of customers these days don't want that, so we've started offering cloud hosted options. Since we're a Windows shop Azure made sense, and as such the hosted MSSQL also makes sense and is quite convenient.
Fourth is that, while MSSQL is quite anemic in terms of SQL language functionality, it does support transactional schema updates, which makes schema upgrades much less error prone.
Given that MSSQL syntax support is quite limited and we now have developed tooling and library support for multiple databases, we'll probably also add support for PostgreSQL later.