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
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
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
If you come from an SQL Server background, mirroring will be familiar to you. It may be good or bad, but hopefully not at a nightmare level. Whatever your association with database mirroring, it is also available within Microsoft Fabric. What is mirroring If you're not coming from a SQL Server background, or any data … Continue reading DP-700 training: Implement mirroring
Some time ago, I wrote a number of blog posts comparing the different Azure SQL options to give you some idea about performance, differences between tiers and differences between the Stock Keeping Units (SKU's). I did this by creating data in the database and reviewing the metrics. This worked well and gave a good overview … Continue reading Loadtesting SQL, the sequel
Data security is the most important part of our job as data engineers and data architects. There are very few use cases where people need to see all the data in full detail. I know, customers take a different view on this but in reality, do they really need every single detail? No, they do … Continue reading DP-700 training: data masking
