Microsoft describes Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI) as offering near-full SQL Server compatibility with more flexibility than typical PaaS. So naturally, I wondered: how much control does a developer really have?
I set out to find out, not by reading the documentation, but by poking around under the hood. The mission? To see whether SQL MI could support fast, lightweight cloning using the same tricks I’d used before: spinning up parent-child VHDs, mounting them, and leveraging .mdf files, but now from within the SQL MI instance. If SQL MI was just « SQL Server in a VM, » it might work. If