Cloud Consulting Pre-Engagement Questionnaire – A Bookmark

The cloud phenomenon is no more a dream for many, but a reality for several customers I have been working with. Many of my customers are looking for guidance and from time to time I get an opportunity to have some deep constructive discussions. These discussions can range from should I be going to cloud or not, is this app cloud ready, can we do a lift-shift of this application directly to some cloud player etc. Though each of these discussions lead from one point to another, there is a lot of profiling I do with customers. In this blog, I want to talk about a conversation I had with one of my customers who was evaluating cloud for one of his applications. Let us see a Cloud Consulting Pre-Engagement Questionnaire.

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SQL SERVER – Backup to URL Fails in Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Deployment Model with Error – (400) Bad Request

During my previous consulting engagement, I learned something new with SQL Server feature called back up to the URL. Since it was not so clearly documented, I am sharing this with you. In this blog post, let us learn about Azure Resource Manager. If you have not heard about this feature, you can think of it as variation of the SQL backup feature. In this type of backup, the destination would be an Azure storage rather than disk or tape. You can read more about this feature on my previous blog SQL SERVER – Backup to Azure Blob using SQL Server 2014 Management Studio.

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SQL SERVER – Creating a Copy of Database in Azure SQL DB

Recently I was about to undertake an interesting assignment for one of my clients who pinged me for Performance Tuning exercise. Since this is something I have been doing full time in the past couple of months, I got into the call immediately. Lesser did I know what I was about to get into actually. Since the problem was about SQL Server query performance, I thought it would be the usual routine. Let us learn about how to create a copy of the database in Azure SQL DB.

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SQL SERVER – Setting Firewall Settings With Azure SQL Server VMs

Recently I had a session around using SQL Server on Azure and during this session one of the questions was to access the SQL Server in a Hybrid Setup. This is a typical scenario wherein the developer was requesting to connect to the SQL Server running on a VM from his application that was sitting inside his environment. Though there were specific steps that needed to be taken, he was getting some error. Let us learn about how to setup firewall with Azure SQL Server VMs.

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SQL SERVER – How to Change SQL Server Collation on Microsoft Azure VM (IaaS)

I have been using Microsoft Azure, SQL Virtual Machine (IaaS) for quite some time because few of my clients ask questions about them. My clients generally use images from gallery to deploy SQL Server. Once they realized that they want to change the SQL Server collation instance. I was contacted to know the steps to do that. I learned something new so sharing via the blog.

Caution: Rebuild of system databases is as good as the fresh installation of SQL Server. YOU WOULD LOSE ALL EXISTING INFORMATION so please backup the stuff, if needed.

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SQL SERVER – Introduction to SQL Azure Database Throttling

In standalone versions of SQL Server, if your SQL Server receives more concurrent requests than it can service simultaneously, it will queue the requests for later processing (subject to certain limits—generally available memory on the box). For example, if you have the max worker thread configuration option set to 100 and there are already 100 queries submitted to the server than any new requests are simply queued until one of the worker threads completes and can pick up the request. Except in fatal circumstances where DBA intervention is required this will allow all of the requests to eventually complete (or potentially timeout, if the client specified this setting). Let us understand about SQL Azure Database Throttling.

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