Daniel Hutmacher uses a temp disk for a temp database:
Almost all Azure virtual machine sizes come with a temporary disk. The temporary disk is a locally attached SSD drive that comes with a couple of desirable features if you’re installing a SQL Server on your VM:
- Because it is locally attached, it has lower latency than regular disks.
- IO and storage are not billed like regular storage.
As the name implies, the temporary disk is not persistent, meaning that it will be wiped if you shut down your VM or if the VM moves to another VM host (as part of maintenance or troubleshooting). For that reason, we never want to put anything on the temporary disk that we need to keep.
I’d say this was a lot more popular several years ago, back when spinning disk was the default for Azure storage. There can still be benefits from doing this, though if you’re using Premium storage with high IOPS, the biggest remaining benefit is around latency.