Being heavily involved with Microsoft Azure and database technologies it was only a matter of time that I would enter the world of Azure Container Instances (ACI). The same could be said about AKS – Azure Kubernetes Services, but that for I have used this technology to deploy ML models to. Anyways, going back to ACI – why would you be interested?
Just a really quick FYI for the readers. If you are using Managed Instances in Azure (If not, why not?) and you connect vis SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) and run the classic commands SELECT @@VERSION, what will you see?
On the theme of failover groups let’s do a quick recap on my environment. As shown below you can see the secondary database server called spacesql in West Europe.
You have an Azure SQL Database, it could be a single database, it could be a primary database within a failover group. Regardless of the context, what would you do if you need to upgrade the compute tier for the database but then you decide you no longer want to do this and want to immediately cancel it? In the past people just let the system carry out the task then once complete, rollback.
It is quite a common requirement to restore a copy of a database to the same Azure SQL server, you just issue a COPY OF command. What if you need to restore a copy to a different target Azure SQL server? Well its similar, just with a slight difference in that you need to refer back to the source server within your code.
Being aligned to a global cloud like Microsoft Azure you have choices. Whether that is Azure SQL Database or Azure Database for MySQL for your relational database, it does not matter that is down to you are your design choices. The point here is that Azure has variations and flexibility with so many choices and this is no different within the “Big Data” analytics space.
A quick post today, quite simply, the error message is:
“code”: “ConflictingDatabaseOperation”, “message”: “Operation on server x and database y is in progress. Please wait a few minutes before trying again.”
When moving to a cloud model for your database stack no doubt you will be involved in a costing exercise. The good news is if you have Software Assurance with your existing licenses then expect some cost savings when moving to the cloud. You can save up to 70% cost when compared to a pay as you go model.
It has been a while since I wrote a blog post for TSQL Tuesday and there is no better time then now following on from Brent Ozar’s Invite about our favourite data types in SQL server.
I always follow a contained user model when setting up users within my Azure SQL Database. I do this so the user in question has access to only specific database(s) and does not have a login to the server. It becomes even more apparent the importance of this when you design a solution based on failover groups.
When a failover occurs to the secondary, I want a pleasant experience for the user. With the contained user model, the user goes with the database. I don’t want to do admin work on the new primary (post failover). Let’s see.
