SQL Azure Performance

SQL Azure Performance Tuning is a much tougher task than SQL Server, as I noted in the Azure Report Card – SQL Azure lacks some of the basic tools available to SQL Server DBA’s. There really isn’t too much to do tuning your SQL Azure instance as almost all the settings available for SQL Server are [...]

Backup is currently a major gap in the SQL Azure product, but with support for Database Copy TSQL command has given at least one option for directly backing up a SQL Azure database by copying a source Azure database to a newly created  Azure database. The TSQL command structure below provides will produce a copy [...]

SQL Azure is essentially a cut down version of SQL Server and so we would expect that migrating from SQL Server to SQL Azure should be a straightforward task. However, in the first release of SQL Azure, the scripts generated by SQL Server Management Studio will require some extra cleanup since not all the SQL [...]

As at launch in January 2010 SSMS can connect to SQL Azure, but the object browser does not work. Ensure that you have setup the SQL Azure firewall to allow your IP to connect to SQL Azure. Start up SSMS and when the connection dialog appears hit Cancel, this is due to a connection error [...]

SQL Azure Database Service Update 1 has just gone live with several improvements to SQL Azure. Most importantly it is now possible to programatically move between the 1GB and 10GB SQL Azure editions (previously users were forced to do a migration!). This can be done using the following syntax: ALTER DATABASE database_name { MODIFY (MAXSIZE [...]

Since the SQL Azure database services are in the cloud, you do not have to worry about high availability and scalability. SQL Azure will maintain a “Monthly Availability” of 99.9% during a calendar month. For example, you or your network administrators do not have to spend time on high availability which is taken care by [...]

So how do you know whether all the T-SQL syntaxes are working with SQL Azure? For the purpose of this example we will use the TSQL from the AdventureWorks database. Database First you need to create a database. You need to be logged in to the Master database to create a database. CREATE DATABASE AdventureWorks2008 [...]

SQL Azure Continuous Backup is one the two main methods for backing up databases which run  on  SQL Azure. Continuous Backup enables developers to backup a database on a continuous basis – as in the backup will not function as a standalone database but must be restored to the original database (in contrast to the [...]

SQL Azure Clone Backup is one of the two primary methods for backing up SQL Azure databases. Clone Backup is promised coming in H2 2010 – although there have been no announcements to date. The clone will create a single (perhaps scheduled) snapshot of a database at a point in time. The other main method [...]

SQL Azure is a subset of SQL Server, at its core it is therefore fully compatible with SQL Server. However there are several features of SQL Server are absent in SQL Azure: The below features are not supported in SQL Azure: SQL Server Agent SQL Server Error Logs SQL Server Utility SQL Server PowerShell Provider [...]