The Ashdar Partners Blog

The highlights for this week have been a few videos from the free-to-view PASS Summit 2016 archive, available at PASS.org . Managing SaaS Application Databases with Elastic Jobs: SQL Agent and More for Azure SQL Database, presented by Deborah Dove Essentially, "Elastic Jobs" is SQL Agent for Azure SQL. She also talks about "Elastic Query", which allows you to run queries on all of your databases, or a specific subset of them. Azure Data Services: Spotlight on Azure SQL Database, presented by Debora Dove I think that this is a good introduction to Azure SQL and it covers Elastic Pools. I'm sure that I learned a few things. One thing that bothers ms is the low query/minute ceilings for the various offerings. Design Patterns for SaaS Applications with Azure SQL Database, presented by Bill Gibson If you are going multi-tenant, sharding and employing Elastic Pools seems to be the only sane choice. "Most of our customers are compute-bound, n...

The summer has been busy and my Azure training schedule has suffered. Here are a few highlights from the last few weeks of study. The following are presentations that occurred during SQLPASS Summit 2016. I can't  link to these presentations directly because they are behind a paywall (though it is free to subscribe): Backup and Restore SQL Server Databases in Microsoft Azure, presented by  Andy McDermid and Pinal Dave This presentation is about Virtual Machines, not SQL Azure. My takeaways were: Segregating data, log, tempdb and backup locations is still recommended practice. The "backup to URL" feature can be useful because frees up a disk because it is not needed to hold backup files and writing to a URL doesn't count as bandwidth usage against your VM disks. "Backup to URL" can stripe the data just like writing "regular files" can. You need to ensure that the costs associated with the (required) Azure Storage Account make sense. You...