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.
Yes, a really nice new shiny feature where we have the ability to suspend and resume the encryption scan for TDE – Transparent Data Encryption which is available in SQL Server 2019. (Tested against the latest version CTP 2.4)
There is a new way to setup Azure elastic jobs to run against a target group of databases (targeting an elastic pool). I actually found the process quite messy ( especially when trying to setup all the security access via T-SQL). Setting it up via the Azure portal is not currently an option. The first element remains the same, the need to create a “Job database”. This is the central database, think of it as the master. (Not really the master database in SQL Server but holds a lot of metadata etc) Then you need to define the group (usually the elastic pool), create credentials for access and then the job itself.
Another re-post of a video from last year, this time showing you an in-built protection of setting max server memory for your SQL Server. You can clearly see that if you enter a silly figure such as 50 MB, the minimum memory amount allowable for max server memory is 128 MB. You will see SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) change it to 128MB.
A quick video clip showing how to create a deadlock in SQL Server and find information about it.
It has been a while since I have participated in a T-SQL Tuesday but I felt the urge to do so this month because of the host – Shane O’Neill (a good friend) and the topic of cookies (not the edible type).
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?
I seem to be writing solely about Azure so to shake things up a bit I am going back to my “roots”. In SQL Server your differential backup is cumulative and NOT incremental and a differential will contain the data that has changed since the last full backup.
Let’s dig in using DBCC PAGE.
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.
You will very likely know that SQL Server 2008 / R2 end of support is on July 9th 2019. Not that long to start thinking about and assessing your options. For this post I just want to discuss couple of things that you can do and I specifically mention Azure technologies, think of this as a high level starter guide.
