Azure SQL DB

Azure SQL DB Frequently Asked Questions

Last Updated April 14, 2021

I’ve seen your search history. 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…

[Video] Top 3 Pitfalls of Managing Your Azure SQL DB Costs

Last Updated June 23, 2020

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB, Videos

You manage servers, not invoices. Your company has started to move their databases into Azure, and they’re asking questions that you’re just not ready to answer. How big does your server need to be when you’re moving an existing database up to the cloud? How are servers measured? How do you measure to know if…

Research Paper Week: Constant Time Recovery in Azure SQL DB

Last Updated August 11, 2019

Brent Ozar

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

Last Updated August 11, 2019

Brent Ozar

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…

Developers: Azure SQL DB Serverless can save you money.

Last Updated July 8, 2019

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB

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,…

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

Last Updated April 2, 2019

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB

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…

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

Last Updated March 1, 2019

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB

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.

Last Updated February 26, 2019

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB

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?

Last Updated February 18, 2019

Brent Ozar

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…

Azure SQL DB

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