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.
Sometimes you may not want to flip over to the Azure portal to grab the database size, such as the used space below.
Checking out the transaction log in Azure SQL Database. If you are curious like me, you will want to know about what your transaction log is doing in the cloud. The following queries have been tested and run okay within Azure SQL Database it gives you some great insight. First up, the classic log_reuse_wait_desc. You can’t exactly do much with this output, more so, just to fulfill curiosity.
Have you ever wanted to capture the T-SQL, waits, sessions IDs (etc) at a specific time for Azure SQL Database? Sure there are a few ways to do this. Extended Events comes to mind but I wanted to do something different.
Checking out the transaction log in Azure SQL Database. If you are curious like me, you will want to know about what your transaction log is doing in the cloud. The following queries have been tested and run okay within Azure SQL Database. It gives you some great insight.
Getting straight to the point, I initiated a very common task recently, another scale up request. However, a new message popped up. “The service objective assignment for database on server could not be completed as the database is too busy. Reduce the workload before initiating another service objective update”.
If you decide to use IP addresses to control what services have access to your Azure SQL Database, then understanding firewall rules are important. Within this important area you have the ability to create firewall rules that are scoped to the database or server level as shown below.
One of the features Microsoft wants us to use for Azure SQL Database is Automatic Tuning. Automatic Tuning is a feature where you can think of it as entering the world of self-running and self-tuning databases.
It is said to be safe, reliable and proven using complex algorithms and built-in intelligence where it can do the following (see this link for more details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-database-automatic-tuning)
Forget about Adaptive Query Processing for a minute, what other feature have I been waiting for? SELECT INTO a specific filegroup, not the default filegroup! I have needed this feature many times in the past. Let’s take a look at it using the WideWorldImportersDW database.
So what is the default isolation level for Azure SQL Database? I ran the following code to check it out.
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