My previous post on load testing Azure SQL covered the General Purpose Edition, let's move it up to the Business Critical Tier The Business Critical tier comes in two flavours: General and confidential compute. For my testing, I've stuck with the General SKU. I haven't seen confidential compute with customers, and it has very specific … Continue reading Load testing SQL: the sequel. Let’s get Business Critical!
My previous post on load testing Azure SQL covered the Premium Edition; today I'm moving to the General Purpose Tier. The GP tier comes in two flavours: regular and serverless. Serverless has only one hardware tier: Gen5. With provisioned, you can also select memory-optimised or confidential compute. In earlier tests, I never found significant differences … Continue reading Load Testing SQL: The sequel. General Purpose Edition
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
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
I was trying out some things to learn more about RegEx when I ran into something weird. When using REGEX_LIKE in a query, I got an error in both SQL Server and Azure SQL Hyperscale. Now, I learned what will be shared in this blog from Cláudio Silva, Greg Low, and Erland Sommarskog. They were … Continue reading SQL Server REGEX_LIKE confusion
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
In today's cloud era, Azure SQL is usually first with new functionality, while on-premises SQL Server follows. One of the new things is the JSON data type and accompanying JSON index. Because I had to learn how JSON works in SQL Server for my DP-800 exam, I decided to see how the JSON index works … Continue reading SQL Server 2025: Testing the JSON Index
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
When you start using SSMS with GitHub Copilot, there is no default set of instructions in place. The agent will just sort of do what it thinks is best. But you can make sure the agent has more knowledge of your local environment (yes, it can be a cloud database as well), how it should … Continue reading SSMS 22.6: Custom Copilot instructions
