Cloud Computing

Folks often email me and ask, “Brent, why don’t you do training classes on Azure?” The answer is simple: the products change faster than I can recoup the cost of building the training material. By the time the class gets enough revenue to pay off the downtime for building an Azure (or AWS or Google)…

Research Paper Week: Constant Time Recovery in Azure SQL DB

August 23, 2019

Azure SQL DB, Backup and Recovery

Let’s finish up Research Paper Week with something we’re all going to need to read over the next year or two. I know, it says Azure SQL DB, but you boxed-product folks will be interested in this one too: Constant Time Recovery in Azure SQL DB by Panagiotis Antonopoulos, Peter Byrne, Wayne Chen, Cristian Diaconu, Raghavendra…

Research Paper Week: Automatic Indexing in Azure SQL DB

August 21, 2019

Architecture, Azure SQL DB, Indexing

Before I give you the link to the next research paper in this week’s series, I wanna give you a few questions to think about: If you had to build something to automatically add indexes to SQL Server databases, where would you start? What data would you use to make your decisions? How would you…

Now is the time to sharpen your cloud database skills. Here’s how to start.

June 11, 2019

Many of us DBAs have been able to put off dealing with the cloud. That time is quickly coming to an end. But when was resistance to change ever a great career strategy in a tech field? Besides, two or three or four years from now, you might not have much choice in the matter.…

Developers: Azure SQL DB Serverless can save you money.

May 7, 2019

If you’ve got a database that doesn’t need to be on all the time, Azure SQL DB Serverless is in public preview now. It makes a lot of sense for those development databases you have to keep around, but don’t really want to pay for. If your database doesn’t get any queries for 6 hours,…

Fixing Performance By Throwing Cloud At It

April 23, 2019

Cloud Computing

Your databases are hosted in the cloud – either in VMs or in a database-as-a-service – and you’re having a performance emergency that’s lasted for more than a day. Queries are slow, customers are getting frustrated, and you’re just not able to get a fix in quickly. Just ask management if they want to throw…

Building a SQL Server app? Start with Azure SQL DB.

April 2, 2019

No no, April Fool’s was yesterday. Hear me out. Azure SQL DB’s feature limitations are a good thing. It doesn’t support everything that SQL Server supports, like CLR, cross-database transactions, database mail, linked servers, and OPENQUERY, but…frankly that feature-limitation page reads like a list of my favorite things to tell developers to avoid. You shouldn’t…

Pop quiz: what do these things cost?

March 12, 2019

Cloud Computing, Hardware, Licensing

It’s been a few years since we’ve stopped in for a sanity check. Quick: without searching the web for prices, put these items in order. Do it on a scratch paper, guessing how much you think each one costs, then arrange ’em. SQL Server 2017 Standard Edition licensing for 4 cores SQL Server 2017 Enterprise…

In Azure SQL DB, what does “The connection is broken and recovery is not possible” mean?

March 8, 2019

All it really means is, “Click Execute again, and you will be fine.” If I had a dollar for every time I saw this error message in SQL Server Management Studio: The connection is broken and recovery is not possible. The error says: The connection is broken and recovery is not possible. The connection is…

There’s a bottleneck in Azure SQL DB storage throughput.

February 26, 2019

As you pay more for Business Critical Azure SQL DB servers, they’re supposed to get more storage throughput. The documentation on this is kinda hard to read, but boiling it down, for every core you add to a Gen5 server, you’re supposed to get 2,500 IOPs. That should scale linearly: insert speed should go up evenly with…

What does Azure SQL DB Automatic Index Tuning actually do, and when?

February 19, 2019

Azure SQL DB, Indexing

Azure SQL DB’s Automatic Tuning will create and drop indexes based on your workloads. It’s easy to enable – just go into your database in the Azure portal, Automatic Tuning, and then turn “on” for create and drop index: ENGAGE Let’s track what it does, and when. I set up Kendra Little‘s DDL trigger to log index changes, which…

How fast can a $21,468/mo Azure SQL DB load data? (Updated)

February 13, 2019

Update March 19: Microsoft has since acknowledged a hidden limit, then documented it, then raised it – but it’s still disappointingly slow. In my last post, I explored how fast a $5,436/mo Azure SQL DB Hyperscale could load data. I’d had a client who was curious about spinning up their dev environment up there to…

How fast can a $5,436/mo Azure SQL DB Hyperscale load data?

February 12, 2019

Hyperscale

A client asked, “How quickly could we spin up a full copy of our database in the new Azure SQL DB Hyperscale?” Their database size wasn’t too far off from the 340GB Stack Overflow database, so I decided to migrate that to Hyperscale to see how the experience went. Hyperscale is Microsoft’s intriguing competitor to Amazon Aurora. Hyperscale…

How Azure SQL DB Hyperscale Works

January 2, 2019

Managed Instances, Microsoft Azure

Microsoft is starting to talk about the internals for Azure SQL DB Hyperscale, their competitor to Amazon Aurora. Aurora took the open source MySQL and PostgreSQL front ends and hooked them up to much more powerful cloud-first storage engines on the back end. Here’s a quick primer on how Microsoft is doing something similar –…

What Azure SQL DB Managed Instances Don’t Support (Yet)

December 14, 2018

Managed Instances

Whenever a new product or feature comes out, I like keeping an eye on its support forums to understand the challenges users are facing. I went through Azure SQL DB’s Managed Instance feedback forum, and here are some of the interesting issues that have been raised: Support for other collations – sounds like right now…

Azure SQL DB is Slow: Do I Need to Buy More DTUs?

December 6, 2018

You’ve got an Azure SQL DB, and your queries are going slow. You’re wondering, “Am I hitting the performance limits? Is Microsoft throttling my queries?” There’s an easy way to check: run sp_BlitzFirst. sp_BlitzFirst is our free performance health check stored procedure that analyzes a lot of common performance issues and then gives you a…

What’s Different About SQL Server in Cloud VMs?

August 29, 2018

Cloud Computing

When you start running SQL Server in cloud VMs – whether it’s Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, or Microsoft Azure VMs – there are a few things you need to treat differently than on-premises virtual machines. Fast shared storage is really expensive – and still slow. If you’re used to fancypants flash storage on-premises, you’re…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: What Cloud Hosting Costs

July 16, 2018