Cloud architecture, managed databases, migrations, and cloud operating tradeoffs.
131 associated posts50 primary posts
I was in Rome to attend a teaching conference, and my AirBnB had the most beautiful view overlooking Rome and Vatican City. While having my morning coffee, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento - and I didn't go through many questions because some of them required really long answers, and I had a great time with those.
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.
Our cruise ship pulled into port in Victoria, Canada, so before we head out to the Butchart Gardens, let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDTuQFiXo2s
When you've got questions about architecture, development, or best practices, post 'em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and upvote the ones you'd like to see me cover. It's like free bite-sized consulting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCbPSYmCTHg
It's an overcast afternoon at Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas, so since I can't go into the water, might as well go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/1c0K-WJ-itk
When I travel, I try to take y'all with me to really pretty or at least interesting locations. On my Tokyo visit last year, I did Office Hours in Akihabara, the electronics & anime shopping hub. Even though I'm not into anime at all and I don't collect that kind of gear, I wanted to see it because it's famous among geeks.
I love SQL Server, and I'm excited for the release of 2025. I think the query processing keeps getting better, which means your apps are gonna go faster, with less code changes. The AI stuff is a little fluffy, and I don't think time will be kind to it, but I totally understand why Microsoft…
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.)
In between clients, I hopped onto my Twitch channel to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. If you'd like to get notified whenever I do one of those live streams, you can follow my channel for free and you'll get email notifications automatically. I do 'em whenever I have time, usually about once a week when I'm at home.
The first few questions from this week's crop at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are very much about what-problem-are-you-trying-to-solve, but they get more complex from there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDUgd_8ZNo
Let's hang out, listen to the peaceful waterfall, and go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is kinda the calm before the storm: in another week, I'll be on the road again for a while, hopefully bringing you some fresh Office Hours locations from the Caribbean and Alaska!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdBa7FKQMWI
I'm finally back in the home office after running around Europe for a month. Let's talk through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl-QQEFkBVg
I've always wanted to see the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, and by happy coincidence, I ended up walking right past it while visiting Barcelona! It's one of the most important beginnings of modern architecture, and I loved it. I brought you along with me and talked through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
While recovering from a nasty cold, I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et1mNyC1lIk
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.
On a nice sunny Saturday, I took the 911 around the Las Vegas canyons, and stopped to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja90e234rIo
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.
I took a break from unpacking my SQL Saturday San Diego bags and re-packing for a Boston wedding long enough to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/Z0GSjyK2bps?si=5u3bMm8MYFkHViBD&t=29
I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento plus hit live ones from the TikTok viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDx-OnTHezA
Let's say you built a web app and it became globally popular. You've got users scattered across North America, Europe, and Asia.
In theory, you could shard your data globally: build 3 sets of SQL Servers, one on each continent, and split up their data.
