Extended Events – Using Azure Storage

Posted on May 8, 2018 by blobeater

Last year I wrote about Azure SQL Database extended events (https://blobeater.blog/2017/02/06/using-extended-events-in-azure/) and gave an example where I was capturing deadlocks via the ring buffer. Ever since then I wanted to do a follow-up post but using Azure storage as the target for my XEL files.

This is more complicated than using the ring buffer as the target and requires a couple of things:

Azure storage account where you create a dedicated container for the files.
SAS key.
Database master key.
Database scoped credential.

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Azure SQL Database vCore

Posted on April 16, 2018 by blobeater

vCore based performance levels are very new, currently in preview and not yet rolled out to all Azure regions (The preview is not available in the following regions: West Europe, France Central, UK South, and UK West.). It does offer a totally different approach to sizing your database.

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Azure SQL Database and Columnstore Indexes

Posted on April 9, 2018 by blobeater

I have come to understand the importance of using columnstore indexes when my queries are aggregating and scanning across many millions of rows.

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4 Improvements to Azure SQL Database

Posted on April 5, 2018 by blobeater

If I was a wizard I would make these 4 improvements to Azure SQL Database. They are in no particular order, in fact I could come up with about 10 features / improvements that I would like to see but I think 4 will be suffice. Some are more realistic than others, I am sure for some of them I am more likely to get a tiger as a pet.

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Azure SQL Database – Failed to Delete Database Nightmare

Posted on April 3, 2018 by blobeater

After demo building and testing features out within Azure SQL Database I like to delete the databases to save costs. Very rarely the following happens when trying to delete a database within Azure.

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