Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Cloud

Thoughts on the Databricks Lakehouse

Published 2026-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Miles Cole writes from inside the company:

The lakehouse architecture introduced a simple but powerful idea: unify the robust data management of the data warehouse with the openness, flexibility, and decoupled storage of the data lake. In principle, a lakehouse can be implemented anywhere, on any object store, with any compute engine that supports open table formats. In this post I want to make the case for why I believe the lakehouse is best realized on the platform that invented the product category in the first place: Databricks.

I’ll make the case with three points:

  1. Robust data management comes standard
  2. Flexibility without the complexity
  3. A track record of innovation

Click through for the argument.

Leave a Comment

Hash Keys and Synapse Tables

Published 2026-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword explains the importance of selecting an appropriate hash key:

In Synapse SQL Pools, Hash distributions allow us to somewhat control data distribution. Whilst this can deliver performance in the right scenarios, I noted last week that these tables should be monitored to avoid skew.

In this post I want to demonstrate how to identify the skew, and why a different distribution model may be better suited.

One of the key tricks is that your choice of hash key should be approximately unique. There’s no explicit uniqueness constraint, but having a column with high cardinality and relatively little skew leads to a good distribution.

Leave a Comment

The Pain of Azure Defender Billing

Published 2026-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones walks through a painful experience:

I hadn’t done much in the last couple of months on Azure. For some reason, I decided to check my bill. What I found was that there were charges for $35-ish/month. This is within my free credit limit as an MVP, but that seemed high. I have a few serverless dbs and some storage, but I was expecting more of a $15 charge.

Azure billing is probably 85% of what an ideal billing solution would look like. There’s a lot of detail and you can get the bill down to a pretty granular level. But the problem is, like Steve found out here, that it’s really hard to tie back individual line items to specific services in a consistent way. Sometimes it’s because of ancillary costs like networking bandwidth. Sometimes, it’s a problem where you can’t easily see what specific resource is costing you money. Either way, it turns a proper audit of the bill into a bit of an ordeal.

Leave a Comment

Azure SQL DB Hyperscale versus Distributed SQL Solutions

Published 2026-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Anna Hoffman clarifies:

In my last post, I broke down the Socrates paper, the research that became Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. Writing it made me want to tackle a question I think trips a lot of people up when they’re choosing a database: is Azure SQL Database Hyperscale “distributed SQL”? 

It’s a fair question. “Distributed SQL” has become shorthand for “the relational database that scales in the cloud,” and anything outside that bucket tends to get filed under “the relational one my company already has.” I’d rather not leave that to assumption, so here’s how I think about it. 

Read on for Anna’s take.

Leave a Comment

Load Testing Azure SQL GP and BC

Published 2026-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens continues a series on load testing. First up is Azure SQL Database General Purpose edition:

My previous post on load testing Azure SQL covered the Premium Edition; today I’m moving to the General Purpose Tier.

The GP tier comes in two flavours: regular and serverless. Serverless has only one hardware tier: Gen5. With provisioned, you can also select memory-optimised or confidential compute. In earlier tests, I never found significant differences between serverless and provisioned, so I skipped testing both SKUs. Given the nature of these tests, going memory-optimised didn’t seem to make much sense either. Also, I’ve never seen any other deployment than the regular Gen5 General Purpose database.

And then there’s Business Critical:

My previous post on load testing Azure SQL covered the General Purpose Edition, let’s move it up to the Business Critical Tier

The Business Critical tier comes in two flavours: General and confidential compute. For my testing, I’ve stuck with the General SKU. I haven’t seen confidential compute with customers, and it has very specific use cases: you want to protect your threads on the processor itself. A lot happens behind the scenes to make that work, and it costs more. There are scenarios where this makes sense, but not in my work. For example, using 8 cores for regular business-critical workloads costs about 3,650 euros each month. Confidential Compute will cost about 6,000 euros each month. So yeah, you need a use case for that.

Click through for results on each.

Leave a Comment

Table Distributions in Azure Synapse Analytics Dedicated SQL Pools

Published 2026-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword has a revelation:

When designing tables in a Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool, I initially focussed on the ‘SQL’ and not so much the ‘pool’. How tables are stored is fundamentally different to other Azure SQL offerings, so it’s easy to get tripped up and impact efficiency and performance.

Let’s see how the SQL pools work differently and how to tailor your tables for optimal performance.

Click through for an explanation of the three distribution strategies and when you might use each. As a quick note, the REPLICATED option sounds like it’d be really great, but in practice, there are some major drawbacks as table sizes get larger. That’s a big part of why we save them for small, rarely-changing dimensions.

Leave a Comment

Load Testing Azure SQL Database (Again)

Published 2026-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens is back in the fight:

When I started hammering Azure SQL again, I had a set of scripts to run and tried to figure out what was happening. For most databases, I could explain the results, but some didn’t make sense. I’ll get back to that later in this series.

A few years ago, I did a similar performance-testing series, where I created the data on the database itself using SqlStress to run a massive load of queries and see what happened. This gave a lot of interesting results, most of which are still valid, but I wanted to try something different.

After a look at some Standard SKUs, Reitse moves up to Business Critical:

My previous post on load testing Azure SQL covered the Standard Edition; today I’m moving to the Premium Edition, which is Business Critical in DTU shape.

Again, the calculation mixes CPU, Memory, and disk I/O. The main difference between Standard and Premium is cost. Premium is more expensive and aimed at mission-critical workloads. It has faster storage and built-in replication options. It also includes redundancy, with features designed to keep your solution online.

There are some interesting cutoff points in the tests that make a low-end P-SKU cheaper and just as good as a higher-end S-SKU.

Leave a Comment

Interpreting the Azure Landing Zone as a DBA

Published 2026-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Boich reviews an architecture:

VNet, subnet, NSG and UDR are four key acronyms that exist between me and my DR replica. The first time I started peering into the network world, trying to figure out the nuance how Azure networking impacts SQL Server was a confusing experience. Honestly, I didn’t know what the heck I was looking at. I found through this project, however, that success lies in the foundation. And, setting up that foundation makes all of the downstream processes much easier. This post is going to cover setting up that foundation in Azure. The empty network will harness all of our future objects.

Read on for an extended analogy that helps explain the key networking concepts in Azure.

Leave a Comment

Connecting Azure Databricks to a Microsoft Foundry AI Gateway

Published 2026-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele connects the dots:

While some people might look at the different capabilities and think this is an “either/or” scenario, the reality is that most Azure customers are going use (or even need to use) both: developers building apps and agents in Databricks, for example, may want to leverage a model or other agent deployed in Foundry. Meanwhile, developers in Foundry may need to call a Databricks managed MCP service.

These types of calls aren’t all that difficult; in fact, both platforms provide built-in connectors or UI solutions to make this happen: simply provide the service endpoint, pick your authentication method, and you’re pretty much done. However, the introduction of the respective gateways, especially on the Foundry side, can make this just a little more complicated. Let’s look at one example.

Click through for that issue and how Drew was able to work around it.

Leave a Comment

Building an Isolated Hyper-V Network for Azure Communications

Published 2026-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Boich continues a series on networking for the DBA:

Before I even touched anything related to Azure, I needed to make sure that nothing I did could impact my Wi-Fi at home. The whole reason why I love home lab environments so much is because it is contained end to end. If I break something in my lab, it’s comforting to know that nothing important will ever be in that blast radius. This post is all about hitting the prerequisites that don’t touch anything important like setting up an isolated lab network, save points for my existing VMs, license checks, and creating an Azure subscription that doesn’t touch anything else.

Read on to see what Jordan did.

Leave a Comment