I do not always use the Azure portal to make database changes or to check for certain information. I use it a lot of for blogging purposes but for some tasks I rather just run code via SSMS – SQL Server Management Studio.
Like what?
Last year I wrote about Azure SQL Database extended events (https://blobeater.blog/2017/02/06/using-extended-events-in-azure/) and gave an example where I was capturing deadlocks via the ring buffer. Ever since then I wanted to do a follow-up post but using Azure storage as the target for my XEL files.
This is more complicated than using the ring buffer as the target and requires a couple of things:
As a mini project I wanted to use Azure logic apps to pull tweets from my twitter account when people were tweeting about #Azure / #Microsoft. From here I used cognitive services – sentiment analysis API which returns a numeric score between 0 and 1. Scores close to 1 indicate a positive sentiment and scores close to 0 indicate a negative sentiment. Then I wanted to put that data into an Azure SQL Database table and link it to Power BI because I wanted to see where in the world tweets were coming from and with what score.
Creating copies of your Azure SQL Database is a common and relatively simple process. You can issue a TSQL statement on the master database such as:
CREATE DATABASE CodeDBcopy AS COPY OF CodeDB
vCore based performance levels are very new, currently in preview and not yet rolled out to all Azure regions (The preview is not available in the following regions: West Europe, France Central, UK South, and UK West.). It does offer a totally different approach to sizing your database.
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)
