You cannot enable trace flags (globally or by session) within Azure SQL Database but did you know that some global trace flags are enabled by default?
What is on?
As Microsoft states “online clustered columnstore index build enables you to optimize and compress your data with minimal downtime without major blocking operations on the queries that are executing while you are transforming the data.”
Based on one of my favourite blog posts ever about unicorns, rainbows and online index operations (https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/a-sql-server-dba-myth-a-day-830-unicorns-rainbows-and-online-index-operations/) I wanted to show that using a command such as
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. First up, the classic log_reuse_wait_desc. You can’t exactly do much with this output, more so, just to fulfill curiosity.
Have you ever wanted to capture the T-SQL, waits, sessions IDs (etc) at a specific time for Azure SQL Database? Sure there are a few ways to do this. Extended Events comes to mind but I wanted to do something different.
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.
Here I am talking about SQL Data Discovery & Classification feature that is built into Azure SQL Database. With this feature you have the ability to classify your database, which is what I will do today. There are 2 attributes to classification which are important components. These are labels and information types. Labels are used to define the sensitivity level of the data stored in the column and information types being the type of data stored in the column.
To start this process, you need to navigate to the security section of your SQL Database, it is actually within Advanced Threat Protection.
I do not usually link straight to other blog posts or technical papers but I really had to with this one because it contains awesome information. The paper is called “Azure SQL Database for Gaming Industry Workloads” by : Pankaj Arora, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft.
Find the link here – https://azure.microsoft.com/mediahandler/files/resourcefiles/azure-sql-database-for-gaming-industry-workloads/Azure%20Sql%20DB%20for%20Gaming%20industry.pdf
Look out for the last section regarding the future, Hyperscale databases, Gen 6 hardware and potential “serverless” offering?
It got me excited.
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.
Getting straight to the point, I initiated a very common task recently, another scale up request. However, a new message popped up. “The service objective assignment for database on server could not be completed as the database is too busy. Reduce the workload before initiating another service objective update”.
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.
