Do you enable this setting to allow automatic tuning to care of all your performance needs? Well not ALL your needs, more so:
- CREATE INDEX
- DROP INDEX
- FORCE LAST GOOD PLAN
Azure SQL Database – Automatic Tuning – Have you enabled it?
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Category Archives: Azure SQL DB
SQL Server Backup / Restore from URL
I think many have covered how you should backup your SQL Server database to Azure storage (also known as backup to URL) but what about restoring? Lets assume you have setup backups and they are working, this is what I usually do.
Cloud Era – Azure DBA
I get asked quite a bit about my thoughts on the impact Cloud computing has on a DBA role. Still in 2019, I get people say oh it’s the death, will you be made redundant? Are you worried? Simply put… No.
Azure Storage Accounts – Open to the Internet?
Let’s get straight to the point. From official documentation it states that “To secure your storage account, you should first configure a rule to deny access to traffic from all networks (including internet traffic) by default. Then, you should configure rules that grant access to traffic from specific vnets. This configuration enables you to build a secure network boundary for your applications”.
Navigate to your storage account, what is the default setting? It is shown below.
Hot Patching sqlservr.exe in Azure SQL Database
An amazing blog post by Microsoft describing the idea of hot patching the database engine in Azure SQL Database to allow for minimal downtime when applying patches to SQL Server. We know that it is one of the benefits of Azure SQL Database but now we get some insight into how it’s done.
SQL Server 2019 – Compatibility Level in Azure
I am not sure when this became available but for Azure SQL Database 150 compatibility level is now available. Last time I created a database few weeks ago, only level 140 ( SQL Server 2017) was available so I think it is a recent thing.
Upon some testing, if you create a new Azure SQL Database by default it is 150 as per the screen shot below (from the script action command)
Azure SQL Database Types
I want to do a quick summary post of the many different types of Azure SQL Database available and I am not talking about elastic pools, VMs etc, more so the singleton type.
Azure SQL Database – Azure Portal Updates
A small but useful change has been made to the Azure Portal for Data Platform objects.
Azure SQL Database Script for Size
Sometimes you may not want to flip over to the Azure portal to grab the database size, such as the used space below.
Azure SQL Database Clustered Columnstore Index
You can read about columnstore indexes here (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/transforming-your-data-in-azure-sql-database-to-columnstore-format/). I won’t rehash the material but high level, these index types are optimized for analytical queries and high compression of data (up to 100x). This format is perfect for the large data sets that can be efficiently compressed using this format and analytical queries with complex calculations that use subset of the table columns.
