For some reason I have friends / colleagues telling me that when scaling (up and down for this example) that no downtime occurs. Well, not only does Microsoft documentation say differently, I will show it. So let’s test it out. Before the practical test, this is the official stance. “There is a switch over period where connectivity is lost to the database for a short amount of time, which can be mitigated using retry logic”.
Azure Advisor – for Azure Data Platform
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could access one main dashboard / report that pulls in information from many tools such as security centre, SQL advisor and cost management tools? Well you can, thus giving you a focal point to implement best practices, called Azure Advisor. This is not specifically for Azure SQL Database, you can leverage this for most resources within Azure. Later in this blog post you see that I will use it as a focal point for my database infrastructure in Azure.
In the Azure portal under services look for “advisor”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs Azure Features List
After much reading through the internet looking for Amazon’s equivalent of Microsoft’s Azure functions (Lambda), I found this outstanding link that ” helps you understand how Microsoft Azure services compare to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Whether you are planning a multi-cloud solution with Azure and AWS, or migrating to Azure, you can compare the IT capabilities of Azure and AWS services in all categories”..
This is extremely handy and wanted to share it with you.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-professional/services
Common Things Admins Miss in Azure SQL DB
This is by no means a complete list but more of a personal list of features I have seen not setup or just missed out when looking at Azure SQL DB. After reading, not only will I hope that you agree but it may provoke you to double check your setups.
Azure Site Recovery jobs fail on servers hosting SQL Server instances with AUTO_CLOSE DBs
This post is to help you if you are suffering from the following issue:
A VSS writer has rejected an event with error. The writer experienced a non-transient error. If the backup process is retried, the error is likely to reoccur. Changes that the writer made to the writer components while handling the event will not be available to the requester. Check the event log for related events from the application hosting the VSS writer.
Symptoms
Consider the following scenario:
- You have a server that is running any version of Microsoft SQL Server.
- This SQL Server instance hosts databases that have the AUTO-CLOSE option set.
- You run a non-component VSS backup (for example, by using Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Agent) against volumes of this server that is hosting SQL Server database files.
In this situation, you notice that the VSS backup fails and triggers the following entry in the Application log.