Do you want to identify the correct Service Tier and Compute Size ( was once known as performance level) for your Azure SQL Database? How would you go about it? Would you use the DTU (Database Transaction Unit) calculator? What about the new pricing model vCore? How would you translate you current on-premises workload to the cloud?
I personally think that query store has been a fantastic feature. I find myself using it for query performance troubleshooting (plan regressions is a big one). This has always been available since SQL Server 2016 and even Azure SQL Database but now Microsoft have made it available for Azure SQL Data Warehouse (DW).
If you connect to the Azure SQL DW via SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) there is no Query Store Node (for the version, I was checking 17.9.1). I was even wondering if it was on by default?
You cannot enable trace flags (globally or by session) within Azure SQL Database but did you know that some global trace flags are enabled by default?
What is on?
As Microsoft states “online clustered columnstore index build enables you to optimize and compress your data with minimal downtime without major blocking operations on the queries that are executing while you are transforming the data.”
Based on one of my favourite blog posts ever about unicorns, rainbows and online index operations (https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/a-sql-server-dba-myth-a-day-830-unicorns-rainbows-and-online-index-operations/) I wanted to show that using a command such as
Checking out the transaction log in Azure SQL Database. If you are curious like me, you will want to know about what your transaction log is doing in the cloud. The following queries have been tested and run okay within Azure SQL Database it gives you some great insight. First up, the classic log_reuse_wait_desc. You can’t exactly do much with this output, more so, just to fulfill curiosity.
Have you ever wanted to capture the T-SQL, waits, sessions IDs (etc) at a specific time for Azure SQL Database? Sure there are a few ways to do this. Extended Events comes to mind but I wanted to do something different.
Here I am talking about SQL Data Discovery & Classification feature that is built into Azure SQL Database. With this feature you have the ability to classify your database, which is what I will do today. There are 2 attributes to classification which are important components. These are labels and information types. Labels are used to define the sensitivity level of the data stored in the column and information types being the type of data stored in the column.
To start this process, you need to navigate to the security section of your SQL Database, it is actually within Advanced Threat Protection.
I do not usually link straight to other blog posts or technical papers but I really had to with this one because it contains awesome information. The paper is called “Azure SQL Database for Gaming Industry Workloads” by : Pankaj Arora, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft.
Find the link here – https://azure.microsoft.com/mediahandler/files/resourcefiles/azure-sql-database-for-gaming-industry-workloads/Azure%20Sql%20DB%20for%20Gaming%20industry.pdf
Look out for the last section regarding the future, Hyperscale databases, Gen 6 hardware and potential “serverless” offering?
It got me excited.
Checking out the transaction log in Azure SQL Database. If you are curious like me, you will want to know about what your transaction log is doing in the cloud. The following queries have been tested and run okay within Azure SQL Database. It gives you some great insight.
Getting straight to the point, I initiated a very common task recently, another scale up request. However, a new message popped up. “The service objective assignment for database on server could not be completed as the database is too busy. Reduce the workload before initiating another service objective update”.
