SQL Azure works constantly in the background monitoring usage and providing automatic tuning updates and recommendations to ensure your application performs optimally.

Azure SQL Database has a built-in intelligence mechanism that can automatically tune and improve performance of your queries by dynamically adapting the database schema to your workload. In Azure SQL Database, you don’t need to worry about the index analysis and design, because Azure SQL Database learns about your workload and ensures that your data is always optimally indexed.

Azure SQL Database uses built-in intelligence and advanced rules that analyze your queries, identify what kind of indexes would be optimal for your current workloads, and what indexes might be removed. This way, Azure SQL Database ensures that you have a minimal necessary set of indexes that optimize most of your queries that read data, with the minimized impact on the queries that updates.

These are the best practices based on the experience of the thousands database experts who manage their own database last 20 years. The best practices are built-in directly into the Azure SQL Database engine and available to all Azure SQL Database users.