Problem Summary: One of the biggest challenges in creating an Azure Managed Instance is determining the resource limits. In this case study, we use the Microsoft guidelines and the SQL Server Distributed Replay feature to assess a SQL Server migration and choose the right service tier. The Distributed Replay Test Current Production (Source Server):  48

If you are a DBA, you understand the importance of having a robust Database Maintenance Solution. Ola Hallengren has developed an excellent maintenance implementation using T-SQL scripts. It’s a free solution replacing the traditional GUI maintenance plan (for a variety of databases, applications, and sizes). The SQL Server community recommends this solution for running backups,

Microsoft is grouping all the options for SQL running in the Azure platform into one portfolio.  A family of managed products, making it easier to see them and choose the best for your needs. Cloud computing requires new security paradigms unfamiliar to many application users, database administrators, and programmers. When it comes to Azure SQL Security,

Backing up your SQL Server database is essential for protecting your data. When databases come bigger, you’re going to run out of time to do a full backup every day. That’s why many companies have differential backups running over the night (daily) and backups full on weekends. What are differential backups? The differential backup is based on

If you ever asked yourself (or management) question – what is the acceptable level of data loss, and how long it may take in case of disaster? It means you were thinking of RPO and RTO even without knowing about these abbreviations. RTO – Recovery Time Objective Recovery Time Objective (or RTO in short) –

Since Azure SQL Database is database-scoped, there are some significant differences when it comes to performance tuning. Microsoft provides some ways to leverage and find out details about how your database is performing in Azure. Let see a few of these: 1) Extended Events Extended Events (also called XEvent) provide a powerful tool to troubleshoot.

What is Azure SQL Managed instance? SQL Managed Instance is a cloud database service that preserves all PaaS capabilities (automatic patching and version updates, automated backups, high availability) that reduce management overhead and TCO. It provides a native virtual network (VNet) implementation that addresses common security concerns, and a business model favorable for existing SQL Server customers. Why choose the Azure

SQL Server installation does not repeat often, especially if you are using on premises servers. You just set it up, change configuration to optimal, and let it run. It may be a different use case if SQL Server instance is running on the cloud and is being recreated every time (if, for any reasons, cloud

The Microsoft SQL Server Licensing Guide is really not long and contains just over fifty pages. However, the challenge here is that it refers to other related memos and manuals such as Capacity Guide, Volume Licensing Guide, SQL Server Virtualization Guide, etc. So, to address the challenge, the most straightforward way would be to familiarize

Why is this needed? When users notice that web pages or other systems are running slow, they start complaining to System or database administrators. How to know if your database is running fine and is not bottleneck in this situation? Using a built-in Microsoft tool called Performance monitor is one of many possible options to

As Cloud computing is getting more popular, many companies choose to deploy a hybrid environment using a mix of on-premises data centers and public clouds. Microsoft Azure allows users to synchronize tables or databases between Azure SQL Databases (Azure Cloud) and on-premises SQL Server databases. Moving data around efficiently in a hybrid cloud environment is

Few technologies in SQL Server cause as much confusion to a developer than indexes. Indexes operate “behind the scenes”: adding and removing indexes rarely result in changes to an application’s code. The proper index can drastically increase the performance of an application. However, there are tradeoffs to almost any feature, and indexes are no exception.