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.
Cloud Era – Azure DBA
Reply
Azure SQL Database Failover – Grace Period?
The Azure SQL Database service triggers an automatic failover after a failure is detected and the grace period has expired. What is the grace period? You can find this setting when building a failover group.
Backup Techniques for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
In the previous blog post I did a quick overview building a SQL VM (imaged) in Azure. It is now time to clarify some backup techniques because it can get confusing.
At a high level there are 3 techniques.
- Automated backup.
- Azure backup for SQL VM (that’s what MS call it).
- Manual backup, for example backup to URL.
I prefer not setting up manual backups to storage accounts, I have done it, I just find it painful to setup/support/fix. So my choice would be automated backup vs “Azure backup” for SQL VM. What’s the difference?
SQL Server Virtual Machines in Azure
Let’s create a virtual machine in Azure that has an imaged copy of SQL Server on it. I want to do this because down the line I want to show how you can setup automated backups to a storage account based on an IaaS extension, when I do that I will most likely talk about the different backup options because there are many.
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.
Training – Learning Data Science
You should never stop learning, especially within the IT industry. There are many fields to move into nowadays within the data space, you still have your classic / cloud DBA roles (crossing over to roles such as data engineer) and development roles too. Looking at the industry I see things like Big Data and Data Science becoming more popular. This led me to the Microsoft Professional Program where I spent my time completing the Big Data track – unfortunately it will be retired by Microsoft.
