Initially, the main focus of this post was going to be quick and about using the latest version of SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) to check out execution plans for Azure SQL Data warehouse (DW). I got a little side tracked by a certain operation called – SHUFFLE, because, I like the name.
I have come to understand the importance of using columnstore indexes when my queries are aggregating and scanning across many millions of rows.
If I was a wizard I would make these 4 improvements to Azure SQL Database. They are in no particular order, in fact I could come up with about 10 features / improvements that I would like to see but I think 4 will be suffice. Some are more realistic than others, I am sure for some of them I am more likely to get a tiger as a pet.
After demo building and testing features out within Azure SQL Database I like to delete the databases to save costs. Very rarely the following happens when trying to delete a database within Azure.
I was looking forward to do some work with Azure SQL Data Warehouse (DWH) when I hit the new query button and had the following message pop up –
Cannot connect to database when it is paused. (.Net SqlClient Data Provider)
I have decided to do a summary blog post on backup and recovery options for Azure SQL Database. If you have a DBA background, you will know the importance of securing backups for your SQL Server databases. We have many options to do such a thing; being full, differential, log and filegroup backups. The common question that is asked is how do you backup (and restore) Azure SQL Databases? Or, what are the options available?
Back in September 2017 Microsoft announced a new security feature for Azure SQL Database called the SQL Vulnerability Assessment (VA). It is currently in preview mode where it has the ability to find, you can guess, security based vulnerabilities for your database such as misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and exposed sensitive data.
Let’s setup a scan. You can find this feature within the settings section of your database.
We all know that the magic figure for cost threshold for parallelism is 5 by default, meaning if the estimated cost of a query is greater than 5 it may very well generate a parallel plan.
Does this apply to Azure SQL Database? Let’s check.
This command only applies to Azure SQL Database, at a high level it empties the database authentication cache for logins and firewall rules for the current USER database.
When you create a “logical” Azure SQL Server (I say logical because we are not really physically creating anything) there is a setting that is ticked ON by default which is called “Allow Azure services to access server”.
The question is, what does it mean? (See the highlighted section below)
