March Madness – SQL Azure – sys.dm_exec_sessions

Yesterday I showed you two ways to find out how changes to SQL Azure may impact your existing database. Today we shift gears a bit and go under the covers of your SQL Azure database to start looking at who is doing what to your database. For those of you used to administering an on-premise instance of … Read more

March Madness – SQL Azure – sys.dm_db_objects_impacted_on_version_change

Yesterday we looked at how you can easily make a copy of a database in SQL Azure. You could even consider that copy to be a backup of your database. I know many DBAs that are reluctant to jump into SQL Azure because of the fact that there is no BACKUP command, and I was … Read more

March Madness – SQL Azure – sys.dm_database_copies

Yesterday we looked at how much your indexes were costing you in SQL Azure. Today we shift focus a bit and I am going to show you something quick and easy for the weekend. We all know that you cannot take a backup of a SQL Azure database. For many DBAs I know this is … Read more

March Madness – SQL Azure – sys.dm_db_partition_stats – Index Cost

Handing your money over to SQL Azure.

Yesterday we looked at how you could determine the cost of a single row stored in SQL Azure. Part of my focus for doing so was to help you understand that a bad database design can lead to higher costs. Creating unnecessarily wide tables will result in more storage which then results in a higher cost. You … Read more

March Madness – SQL Azure – sys.bandwidth_usage

Yesterday we talked about one aspect of SQL Azure pricing but it was only tied to database usage. Today we will talk about the other piece of SQL Azure costs: pushing and pulling data to SQL Azure. The dirty details can be found inside the sys.bandwidth_usage system view: SELECT * FROM sys.bandwidth_usage Go ahead and … Read more