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
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
In case you missed it, Microsoft released a new version of the Metrics App. We all know the current one, and we have opinions on it. But it's all we've got from Microsoft, so we made do. But now, there's a new one. Or, well, a new one. When you install a new version, you … Continue reading Fabric Capacity Metrics App, a huge upgrade!
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
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
