For T-SQL Tuesday #199, Koen Verbeeck posed an excellent question: if your company moved up to the cloud, but after migrating, had to come back on-premises, what would be the big problems?
I've had clients in this exact situation! Here are some of my favorite gotchas from those experiences.
Max Degrees of Parallelism (MAXDOP) tells the database engine, "If you decide to parallelize a query, go parallel with this many worker threads."
(It's a little more complex than that - there is also a coordinating thread, plus a single plan might have multiple parallel zones that each consume MAXDOP worker threads, but for the sake of this blog post, let's keep it simple.)
I've been pretty vocal here on the blog and on social media about the reliability problems with Microsoft Fabric. Today, I've got good news: Microsoft released a new Fabric status page and a known issues page, something that really does take guts given the current reliability situation. The status page still appears to be manually updated, not automated, but at least it acknowledges outages like how SQL endpoints are currently returning incorrect query results:
Update 2025/07/21: Microsoft heard the complaints, and fixed the reliability added a better status page. Baby steps.
Last week, Microsoft Fabric went down yet again for hours on multiple continents.
tl;dr: if you use Azure SQL DB Hyperscale's auto-scaling, it's probably not cutting your bill down because like SQL Server, Hyperscale doesn't automatically relinquish memory, and it'll be up to you to manually manage your own memory if you wanna cut your bill.
Now for the long story.
Last night, two major IT disasters struck:
Microsoft Azure's Central region went down for about 4 hours. The official post-mortem isn't out yet, but rumor has it that while decommissioning legacy storage services, the product group deleted the wrong thing.
Crowdstrike pushed a bad update, leading to blue screens of death on Windows systems worldwide, affecting banking, healthcare, airlines, and more.
Lemme start this off by saying this is probably irrelevant to you. (It's irrelevant to me, too.)
If you're strapped for time, just skip past this blog post.
Or perhaps another way to phrase that is, Microsoft is up to something with parallelism. I don't know how long it's been this way - could even be since the launch of Azure SQL DB Serverless - but I just now noticed it while helping a client with a slow query. When you view an…
If you've been in Azure or Amazon for a few years, you're probably on old, slow hardware.
In the last 3 weeks, I've had two clients who'd both been early cloud adopters. When they'd migrated to the cloud, they both used Azure Ev3 VMs - at the time, a good choice for SQL Server due to its relatively high amount of memory. When the Ev3 VM types were announced in 2017, they were hosted on Intel Broadwell and Haswell processors with 2.3-2.4GHz processing speed.
Amazon just announced new X2iedn instance types for Amazon RDS SQL Server. They're a sweet deal for people who want a high-performance managed database, with really fast cores and more memory per core than you can get in Azure's managed SQL offerings.
Say your workload needs 8 CPU cores. Here's a quick comparison between a few instance types, all priced with SQL Server Standard Edition licensing included:
I got an interesting request for consulting, and I'm going to paraphrase it: We were using Azure SQL DB with automatic index tuning enabled for months. Things were going great, but... we just deployed a new version of our code. Our deployment tool made the database schema match our source control, which... dropped the indexes…
On August 30, Azure's Australia East data center had a big problem, affecting customers like Bank of Queensland and Jetstar. Here's the timeline: 30 August 2023 @ 08:41 – Voltage sag occurred on utility power line 30 August 2023 @ 08:43 – Five chillers failed to restart 30 August 2023 @ 10:30 – Storage and SQL…
In May, Amazon brought out a new Aurora I/O Optimized Serverless instance type. By switching to it, we cut our database costs by 43% overnight, saving us about $1,200 per month.
No strings attached. Just lower prices.
You, dear reader, are most likely a Microsoft SQL Server user - either a DBA or developer.
Set your pencil down for a second because you're not going to learn about a Microsoft product today, nor are you going to learn something that is going to be immediately useful to you in your job. Today, I'm writing about a completely different product just to give you a better insight on what else is out there.
You’re used to managing your own SQL Servers in VMs, but now they’re asking you to work with the cloud.
You’re already comfortable installing, backing up, and performance tuning “regular” SQL Servers, and you just need to catch up with what’s different about the cloud.
For the last twenty years, SQL Server performance tuning has relied on a few facts: SQL Server provided a lot of performance metrics with thorough documentation from both Microsoft and the community. You could fetch those metrics in a variety of ways, like Perfmon counters and dynamic management views. Many of the metrics were cumulative…
SQL Server Always On Availability Groups help you build a more highly available database server by spanning your database across two or more SQL Server instances. When the primary goes down, the secondary can take over. You can also scale out reads to the secondary servers. Distributed Availability Groups take this a step further and…
Let's get you some answers.
Is Azure SQL DB PaaS, IaaS, or SaaS?
Azure SQL DB is platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Microsoft manages most common database tasks for you, and they act as your DBA.
This also means that like a DBA, Microsoft will tell you "no" if you try to implement something that they don't support. There's no negotiations: the answer is just no.
Who is Azure SQL DB for?
Azure SQL DB is a good fit for new applications.
It sounds like a trick question, but I'm serious.
If your company's management is just now starting to consider the cloud in 2020, your reaction shouldn't be to cast a shadow on cloud vendors. Instead, think of it as writing your own resume: what the capabilities that you and your team are really proud of?
Our SQL Server monitoring product, SQL ConstantCare®, uses Amazon Aurora on the back end. I blogged about our choice of database back in 2018, and at the time, I said: I know, I know. The Microsoft geek in you – and me – wants us to use SQL Server on the back end, but here’s…
