Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The ebook " Migrating  SQL Server to  Azure SQL Database Managed Instance " [PDF] provides a quick summary of Azure SQL Database Managed Instance features & steps to migrate to it. Key points from the ebook - Data Migration Assistant reviews the target migration environment and surfaces new features that will benefit your data post-migration. It checks for database compatibility and feature parity The Azure Database Migration Guide can help you plan your migrations  and provide information about migration tools that are available. Input your source and target platform choices into the guide, and it will create a customized playbook to suit your individual scenario Azure Database Migration Service is a fully managed migration service designed to enable seamless migrations from multiple database sources to Azure data platforms with minimal downtime Figure 2: How Azure Database Migration Service works Restore of system databases is not supported. To mig...

I passed the MS Certification Exam 70-473: Designing and Implementing Cloud Data Platform Solutions  yesterday I found the comprehensive list of articles & learning resources compiled by Daniel Calbimonte , helpful. The  eBook Microsoft Azure Essentials: Migrating SQL Server Databases to Azure by Carl Rabeler  [link to PDF] which is not included in that compilation is also very useful As of June 2017, this exam was updated so in addition to the above notably the topic of implementing MySQL and PostgreSQL database solutions in Azure is also covered. It is great that the quality & volume of the Azure official documentation has improved significantly over the last few years. However as there are breaking changes constantly, it is possible that there may be contradictory information (in older Azure Blog posts & the frequently revised Azure documentation) that needs to be watched out for. For instance, Active Geo-replication is now available for all t...

To determine if a cloud solution is cost effective, it helps to know the price of the components of the solution from an Azure billing point of view. Some Azure SQL Database Pricing examples from the official documentation - Pricing example for a single database with extra storage provisioned Suppose an S3 database has provisioned 1 TB. The amount of storage included for S3 is 250 GB, and so the extra storage amount is 1 TB – 250 GB = 774 GB.  The unit price for extra storage in the Standard tier is approximately $0.0851/GB/month during preview, and so the extra storage price is 774 GB * $0.0851/GB/month = $65.80/month .  Therefore, the total price for the S3 database is $148/month for DTUs + $65.80/month for extra storage = $213.38/month. Pricing example for an elastic pool with extra storage provisioned Suppose a 125 eDTU Premium pool has provisioned 1 TB.  The amount of storage included for a 125 eDTU Premium pool is 250 GB, and so the extra storage amou...

Interesting facts about Azure SQL Data Sync from blog posts & comments to articles - Azure SQL Data Sync has been in Preview mode since 2012.  Gmail which was launched on April 1,2004 as an invitation-only e-mail service officially exited its beta status on 7 July 2009 - after 5 years Azure SQL Data Sync can be used to implement the data distribution between on-premises SQL Server, Azure SQL VM and Azure SQL databases, in uni-direction or bi-direction. A Sync Database is a customer owned Azure SQL Database located in the same region as the Sync Group which stores metadata and logs. One Sync Database can be used for many sync groups in the same region. SQL Data Sync is only for SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. All versions after SQL Server 2008 are supported.  SQL Express is planned to be officially supported when the product becomes Generally Available (GA) SQL Data Sync supports an automatic scheduled Sync. 5 minutes is currently the smallest frequ...