Recently I was at a community session talking to a bunch of computer science students about databases and the type of work I have been doing lately in consulting. I wanted to talk about Performance tuning and why it is critical to understand the basics. Some of the fundamental concepts I have learnt in my college days are still helping me solve some of the complex problems I do at consulting. With that in mind, I started my talk about some of the recent assignments and how I have been troubleshooting performance for both SQL Server on a VM and even SQL Server as a service on Azure. It was about 10 mins into the talk that I realized something was totally wrong, I could see blank faces just like when a professor teaches a complex topic. I have been there and could see the reaction. I said I need a glass of water and paused. I asked one of the students to what was going on – He said, “You mentioned the word ‘Azure’ close to 4-5 times now in the past 3 minutes. Can you tell us what Azure is? Is this a new Database in the industry?”