Azure Cosmos DB Intro

Posted on June 10, 2019 by blobeater

Cosmos DB falls into the “NoSQL” technology group, call it a buzz word if you like but it is very different to classic Relational Databases such as SQL Server. I never really understood why it was labeled NoSQL, if you build a document based data model via the SQL API you actually use SQL like language to query the JSON (from the collection). Moving on, it is an evolution from what used to exist called Document DB. (Cosmos DB sounds way more aggressive and punchy, right?) Recently I have been using it to store JSON documents (Document based data model) in Azure, as a fully managed service, i.e. PaaS and maybe you will use it one day.

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Using Azure Data Factory to Migrate Data

Posted on May 22, 2019 by blobeater

Quite simply the objective as follows: Move data from Azure SQL Database to Azure SQL DW via Azure Data Factory v2 (ADF).

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Pausing / Resuming Azure SQL DW

Posted on May 7, 2019 by blobeater

Before writing about pausing (and resuming) Azure SQL Data Warehouse (DW) it makes sense to discuss the architecture of this product. At a high level it involves a control node, a MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) engine compromising of compute nodes and storage. Perfectly summarised by this image.

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Scaling SQL Elastic Pools

Posted on April 15, 2019 by blobeater

There are a few ways to scale a SQL elastic pool. For this blog post I show you how to scale up. It can be done via the Azure portal and Azure PowerShell but not T-SQL.

I would say the PowerShell route is the easiest. Connect to your account and issue the below code. Here I am going from a 100 edtu pool to a massive 2000 edtu pool whilst tweaking the min/max setting.

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Tuning Azure SQL Elastic Pools

Posted on April 11, 2019 by blobeater

The below image is a beautiful picture, now it could be worse. The red line and the green line could peak at the same time and for a very long time or the blue line could behave the same as the red line and peak at the same time as the green line. Regardless of the situation the point of this blog post is when you are hitting your eDTU (elastic database transaction unit) limits within your elastic pools, tune your queries and do not knee jerk and just scale up (straightaway that is).

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