My previous post on load testing Azure SQL covered the Standard Edition; today I'm moving to the Premium Edition, which is Business Critical in DTU shape. Again, the calculation mixes CPU, Memory, and disk I/O. The main difference between Standard and Premium is cost. Premium is more expensive and aimed at mission-critical workloads. It has … Continue reading Loadtesting SQL: The Sequel: Premium Edition
This series of posts is much overdue, but with good reason. When I started hammering Azure SQL again, I had a set of scripts to run and tried to figure out what was happening. For most databases, I could explain the results, but some didn't make sense. I'll get back to that later in this … Continue reading Load testing SQL, the sequel. Standard Edition
That's a lot of D's. It's also my rating; people like Kevin Chant rate at least an A. Anyway, Kevin has written a lot about working with CI/CD; I'm here to clarify what I ran into while building a solution to deploy Fabric code from the Dev environment (a set of workspaces) to production. This … Continue reading Dipping my toes into Azure DevOps Deployments
Last week was filled with talks about SQL Server and Fabric. A large portion of the community travelled to Barcelona to learn from community leaders and Microsoft on their favourite topics. I'll take you through my personal experiences and highlights. Day 0: the MVP day On Monday, you have three options, depending on your relationship … Continue reading Microsoft Fabric and SQL Community Conference 2026, the Barcelona edition
Wait, what? Resiliency? Against what? Well. The cloud sounds like an amazing, magical place without limits. The truth is, it isn't. Maybe you've seen the funny T-shirts with the text "the cloud is just someone else's computer". And that's true. Instead of building and maintaining your own data centre, you're hiring a global corporation to … Continue reading Azure: Check your data platforms resiliency
Last week, I noticed that I published my 250th blog post. I'm not sure if it's something to celebrate (I'm not really someone who celebrates things), but it is an extra reason to write a new post. Endurance I started writing in 2018 after Brent Ozar suggested I do this. He also told me that … Continue reading 250 blog posts
Earlier this year, Microsoft released a new certification that combines AI and SQL Server knowledge: the DP-800: Developing AI-Enabled Database Solutions. As I still deeply care about SQL Server and am convinced it has a very central place in any data architecture (cloud or on-premises), this one sparked a lot of interest. Today, I took … Continue reading DP-800 Exam Experiences
This month, Koen Verbeeck invites the blogging community to write about their thoughts on returning to on-premises. What could be struggles, things we have to re-learn, etcetera. When I read the invite, it immediately sparked inspiration, because there are increasing rumours around cloud exits. People musing about 'what if'. Some clients reference these questions, but … Continue reading T-SQL Tuesday #199: Back to on-prem?
The DP-800 training is new and was released to GA a few weeks ago. It now sits in the same family as DP-600 (Data Analytics using Microsoft Fabric), 700 (Data Engineering using Microsoft Fabric) and 750 (Data Engineering using Databricks). The full name of this training is "Develop AI-Enabled Database Solutions". This one sparked my … Continue reading DP-800: First Microsoft Learn experiences
A lot of you may probably know that I like the GitHub Copilot sidecar chat in SSMS, and that it can really help develop code faster. Even though you have to be aware of how the integration now handles your prompts, it remains a great help to quickly generate code. But did you know that … Continue reading SSMS 22.5 and Copilot: generate code in the query window
