Being in the cloud does have many benefits, from lower administration to fast scaling but another “side effect” of operating in Azure SQL Database is the cloud first nature of changes. By this I basically mean new features always get pushed to Azure first before the classic on-premises version so some gems come to light.
There are many factors to consider when you are thinking about the move to Azure SQL Database (PaaS) – this could be single databases (provisioned compute or serverless) to elastic pools. Going through your head should be how many vCores do you want? What are the I/O requirements, do we need access to certain features like in-memory OLTP? But what about the memory requirements? This has always been a key requirement for SQL Server – those wonderful words – Min / Max memory settings.
How does this relate to Azure? Well it all depends on your vCore count and the generation of hardware we select during the build process.
There are currently 4 hardware generations ( each has its own purpose) :Gen4, Gen5, Fsv2-series and M-series. Each type has xGB per vCore up to a certain max. So it is important to remember this when sizing your workloads. (screen shot summarising is below) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/service-tiers-vcore?tabs=azure-portal
So, for example I select a provisioned Azure SQL Database – 12 vCore on Gen 4 means I will have 84GB memory available for my workload.
Quick video showing you how to failover your Azure SQL Database between your primary and secondary location.
If you have been following me or generally topics around Azure SQL Database and security you would know that it is important to leverage Advanced Data Security (ADS) for Azure SQL Database, if you remember this meant having tools such as advanced threat protection, vulnerability scans at your finger tips.
Data engineers, pipe line developers, general data enthusiasts will be spending most of their time within a notebook. Here you develop your code, nice visualisations and commentary boxes are possible too, a very rich web-based interface and is best experienced with google chrome ( in my opinion).
I have spent many long weekends getting stuck into Azure Databricks, plenty of time to understand the core functionality from mounting storage, streaming data, knowing the delta lake and how it fits into the bigger picture with tech like Event hubs, Azure SQL DW, Power BI etc.
So, I am going to show you how easy it is to create a cluster (that’s the end goal), you will appreciate the ease of deployment for huge amounts of infrastructure.
When it comes to database backups for IaaS based Azure SQL Servers you have 3 options.
One of the main benefits of configuring active geo-replication for Azure SQL Database is leveraging the read-only endpoint, a good technique to split away read only activity from OLTP based workloads. This means that there is no reason why you cannot point users to these databases via tools such as Power BI as highlighted below.
A quick 2 minute overview video (from me) about ADS – Advanced Data Security. The unified package from Microsoft providing the ability to discover / classifying sensitive data, mitigate potential database vulnerabilities, and detect anomalous activities. Enjoy.
I thought being an Azure Data/Database blogger I would share some amazing content from Microsoft, an Azure SQL Fundamentals learning path.
