Azure SQL, Managed Instance, RDS, Aurora, migration, and costs.
28 associated posts28 primary posts
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.)
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
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.
While in Nashville for a creators conference, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/lDdQqlsyGN8
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.
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.
This month, to mark the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, I’m stepping back and looking at the big picture rather than blogging about database problems & solutions like I usually do.
I'm going to generalize a little by decade here to keep things simple.
This month, to mark the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, I'm stepping back and looking at the big picture rather than blogging about database problems & solutions like I usually do.
When I started working with databases, we had to:
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…
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, it'll pause billing, and automatically resume again when your queries kick in. Here's how to set it up in the portal:
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 hardware at it.
No no, April Fool's was yesterday.
Hear me out.
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:
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 each added core.
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 see how query plans might look different. Well, as long as I was running this test, I thought - "How does this compare with Azure SQL DB?"
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…
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:
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 prioritized list of reasons why your server might be slow right now.
