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.
A small but useful change has been made to the Azure Portal for Data Platform objects.
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.
Using a Shared Access Signature (SAS) is usually the best way to control access rights to Azure storage resources (like a container for backups) without exposing the primary / secondary storage keys. It is based on a URI and this is what I want to look at today.
I always use the Azure Storage Explorer to build a SAS token. Let’s dig into what the different parts mean.
I only ever use the storage explorer when managing my blobs, files, queues within storage accounts. It is your single view access point for all your storage needs and I totally recommend downloading it and using it (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/features/storage-explorer/).
Do you execute DBCC CHECKDB on your Azure SQL Database? From past experience I know some people do, I would suggest not to bother. Why?
Sometimes you may not want to flip over to the Azure portal to grab the database size, such as the used space below.
Microsoft and Oracle recently announced a joint cloud partnership (I have seen the word multi/cross-cloud to explain this) which I found very fascinating to read. It is currently in preview and the idea is to have an integrated cloud experience between Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure. A private dedicated connection is obviously needed and whilst knowing more about Azure, looking at the below diagram it makes sense (from an architecture POV) as the Oracle equivalent of ExpressRoute is FastConnect which is needed.
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.
Hopefully you know that SSMS is a separate install from the main SQL Server install. You can find the binaries from Microsoft (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms) Using SSMS version 18.2, whilst playing around with the options I noticed a dark theme was available, easy to say I got a little excited, then I didn’t.
