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Category: Cloud

Performance on Azure SQL DB Standard Tier

Published 2022-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens continues a series on performance comparisons for Azure SQL DB:

This tier is more expensive than the basic, but starting at 12 euro’s per month up to 3723 euro’s you have a wider range of spending your money and with that a wider performance range. The standard tier is suited for general purpose workloads and can be compared with the general purpose tier whereas the latter works with cores. Standard tier works with DTU’s. The concept of a DTU is a difficult one as the documentation states it’s a blend of CPU, Memory, reads and writes. If you hit a limitation, you’ll be throttled. You can read more about the DTU model here.

One thing I wish Reitse had done in the images was to show them in log scale—there’s a consistent L curve for each (which is good) but makes it hard to see anything after about Standard S4.

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Cost Optimization Tips for Azure

Published 2022-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Kean saves us money:

I constantly see customers with so many managed disks which are unattached and orphaned. Recommendation here would be to delete these if you know you can. Else (from a VM within Azure in the same region where the disks are (to save on egress costs)) use Azure Storage Explorer, download the managed disks as VHD disks, then copy to an Azure Storage account and mark the storage account as Archive (tape storage backend).

Archive storage is estimated less than 10% the cost of managed disk storage. Note, VHDs can be brought back and imported again as managed disks at any time if they are needed.

Pricing can be confirmed by using the Azure Pricing Calculator

There’s a lot of solid guidance in here.

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Rebuilding a Dedicated SQL Pool via Azure DevOps

Published 2022-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Sarath Sasidharan clones an Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pool:

There are many scenarios where you want to create a new Synapse dedicated SQL pool environment based on an existing Synapse dedicated SQL pool environment. This may be required when you need to create a development or test environment based on your production environment by copying complete schemas and without copying data.

Note that this process won’t move the data itself—given that you’re starting with terabytes for an effective dedicated SQL pool, trying to create a bacpac would be an exercise in misery.

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Auto-Scaling SQL Managed Instances

Published 2022-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Amanda Ibrahim answers a customer request:

If the customer needs to configure auto scaling for SQL Managed Instance, where the vCores can be increase and decrease automatically on specific time.

Read on to learn how. This can be useful for dev environments or places where your use case has “office hours”—that is, 90% of your activity takes place during a block of 4-12 hours—and you can afford the time in which the service is unavailable due to scaling.

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Azure Data Explorer September 2022 Updates

Published 2022-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Shaf Mahmood has a few updates for us:

The  optimized autoscale feature has been in place and using reactive logic. It has been helping ADX users by adjusting the cluster size when there is an increase in resources due to ingestion or query load.  The optimized autoscale feature has been further improved with predictive logic. This logic monitors the same metrics as the reactive logic and over time builds up the cluster usage pattern and uses this to forecast and plan the size of the cluster.  The reactive logic is still used to ensure any forecast anomalies or usage pattern changes are still autoscaled appropriately.

There are a few cost-related updates but also updates to visuals, data ingestion, and more.

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Basic Tier Performance in Azure SQL DB

Published 2022-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens keeps things basic:

When you look at the documentation, the basic tier has low CPU (at max less than one), 1 to 4 IOPS per DTU (translating to 5-20 IOPS in total), a latency of 5ms read and 10 ms write and a maximum of 7 days backup retention. Even though it’s advertised as a production database, I wouldn’t store essential data there. However, I can use it for metadata storage in a Data Factory or Synapse Analytics environment.

About the IOPS, one IOP is a read of a disk cluster, usually 4 Kb. In this case, this means that the database is capable of reading 20 to 80 Kb of data per second.

When they say Basic, they aren’t kidding.

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Restoring Azure SQL MI Databases to SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley restores a backup:

My post for T-SQL Tuesday #154 is going to be a demo of the new SQL Server feature that allows you to restore an Azure SQL Managed Instance backup to a SQL Server 2022 instance. Actually, I am not sure if this is a feature or just an enhancement that allows for this behavior to work.

Current versions of SQL Server do not allow the restoration of backups taken on Azure SQL Managed Instance.  Managed Instances are considered “vNext” and runs a different version that is beyond anything on-premises could keep up with due to the frequent changes being applied to Managed Instance. There has always been a disconnect with the restorability between the two platforms, so it is good that Microsoft has found a solution to this limitation.

I’d still like to see the ability to fail from SQL MI to on-prem (or VM) SQL Server—you can go from on-prem to Azure SQL MI, though it sounds like right now, failback is a database restore.

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Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Managed Instance

Published 2022-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mladen Andzic has an announcement:

We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of data virtualization capabilities in Azure SQL Managed Instance, with improved query performance and managed identity as a new supported option for authenticating to storage accounts.  

The data virtualization enables you to execute Transact-SQL (T-SQL) queries on files storing data in common data formats in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 or Azure Blob Storage and combine it with relational data stored locally in the managed instance using logical joins. This way you can transparently access external data while keeping it in its original format and location. There is no data duplication or need to run and maintain ETL processes, which means that you can extract and deliver insights faster. The supported file formats are Parquet, CSV, and JSON.

This is similar to PolyBase in SQL Server 2019 but is a different underlying technology. In SQL Managed Instance, it looks like we only get API-based data virtualization, not the ODBC-based PolyBase we saw in SQL Server 2019.

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