Category: Cloud

Mine Tokus covers the benefit of Azure Dedicated Hosts:

Recently introduced, Azure Dedicated Host Preview provides single-tenant physical servers that can host one or more virtual machines. With this new hosting model, physical server is dedicated to your organization and capacity isn’t shared with other customers. Physical server-level isolation helps to address security and compliance requirements, brings visibility and control over the server infrastructure and enables significant cost savings and licensing flexibility for SQL Server workloads on Azure VMs.

I think this might get some recalcitrant large companies to be willing to adopt cloud technologies.

Meagan Longoria shares thoughts on a change to the Azure portal:

Once your Azure SQL resources are created, you can use the new centralized management hub to administer them. Locate the Azure SQL resources blade to see a list of all of your single databases, database servers, elastic pools, managed instances, and virtual machines running SQL.

If your subscription has a lot of resources, this can be a timesaver.

Hasan Savran explains the scope of unique keys in Cosmos DB:

I wrote about Unique Keys and tried to explain how they work in one of my earlier post. It’s common to use SQL Server’s Primary Key or Unique Indexes to explain Unique Keys of Azure Cosmos DB. If you have a Primary Key in a table in SQL Server, the key you defined cannot be in that table more than once. By adding a unique index or unique constraint in a table, you guarantee that no duplicate values can be in your table. The key word in both of those statement is the TABLE.

Azure CosmosDB Unique Keys do not work like Primary Key or Unique Indexes/Constraints

Read on to learn how Cosmos DB differs.

Hasan Savran shows how to query Cosmos DB documents with SQL:

CosmosDB’s SQL API uses T-SQL like language to query the database. It looks like T-SQL language. You still need to use SELECT, FROM, WHERE clause to retrieve the data you are looking for. It looks similar but it works different because the data structure is different. CosmosDB is not a relational database that means you cannot join other containers.

     Let’s start with SELECT. You can use * to select all properties but just like T-SQL you shouldn’t, pick only what you need. Charge of a Request Units depends on how much data your queries retrieves from containers. ORMs like to select everything and that’s one of the reasons DBAs don’t like them. I know couple of ORM supports CosmosDB. Think twice if you want to use an ORM with CosmosDB. Don’t let an ORM to generate a query for CosmosDB. You will literally pay for it!

Feasel’s Law in force, with a bonus of “ORMs are expensive.”

Emanuele Meazzo points out a benefit from being in the cloud—performance tuning has a direct monetary tie:

A single step up for a single DB can cost from 10% to 25% more than the previous sizing, which translates in 15K or more when dealing with higher specs databases; remember that this is for a single scale up, on a single DB, on a single year.

It’s easy to understand that if your database and/or queries are not well tuned because “scaling will take care of it eventually”, then, you’ll be secretly bleeding money.

We can quantify performance improvements in terms of resource savings, but tying that to the specific business benefits can be hard because that hardware is a capital expenditure and so much of tuning benefits are “we avoided this worse case” rather than “we actively scaled something down.”