Information is at the heart of most software systems and the lifeblood of many organizations, so you want the database that stores this information to be efficient and reliable. But as we know, things happen; sometimes bad things. One of the ways that we can prevent bad things from happening is to know about them in advance like the old saying says, "To be forewarned is to be forearmed."
Azure SQL in its many forms has an abundance of features that help you to monitor the state of your databases and database server. Ranging from prebuilt automated monitoring that is augmented with artificial intelligence through to dynamic management views, SQL Server monitors and logs all aspects of the database engine’s operation and configuration. Intelligent Insights and Azure SQL analytics enable you to easily access the wealth of diagnostic and performance data in an easily digestible format.
This course introduces you to the different database monitoring and notification technologies available, how they work, and how to use them. If you have any feedback relating to this course, feel free to contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.
Azure SQL and SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
Learning Objectives
- Understand the key elements of database monitoring
- Learn about the features of Intelligent Insights, Azure's AI-based database monitoring service
- Create graphical reports using SQL Server Management Studio
- Understand how wait statistics can show you where threads have to wait and how this can be used to monitor performance
- View and fix index fragmentation
- Monitor database storage
- Implement notification alerts on various database platforms
Intended Audience
This course is aimed at database administrators or anyone who wants to learn how to implement systems that can find potential issues that may disrupt the delivery of their database services.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should have experience with SQL Server Management Studio, be familiar with reading and writing SQL, and have an understanding of basic database architecture and administration tasks, like indexes and backups.
Course Related SQL Scripts
https://github.com/cloudacademy/azure-sql-database-monitoring-dp-300
Within SQL Server management studio there are predefined graphical reports available for Azure SQL databases, and those hosted on an SQL Server platform. Aside from the predefined reports, you can create your own using the same report designer as you would for creating report server reports. This chart shows tables that Azure SQL deems as good candidates for memory optimization.
As we've seen, there is ample reporting for Azure SQL databases through the portal, So these reports are geared towards SQL Server instances. When connecting to a server instance, we can see there is quite a variety of reporting available. We can get a 30,000-foot view with the server performance dashboard, which has various links that allow us to drill through to more detail.
Here we have a breakdown of wait types, represented both graphically and in tabular form. We can also view resource-intensive, or expensive queries, in this case in the context of CPU utilization. Here we have query expense in terms of logical reads.
We can view a breakdown of latch wait types. I/O statistics gives us a very informative table of historical I/O activity by database. The AKPart database has been partitioned into multiple files and we can see a breakdown of I/O stats per file.
As well as performance data, we can view server configuration, including a configuration change log report. Here we have a memory usage report at server level. And we can also view a report of blocking transactions. Finally, a performance report of top queries by I/O displayed graphically along with the relevant query text.
Hallam is a software architect with over 20 years experience across a wide range of industries. He began his software career as a Delphi/Interbase disciple but changed his allegiance to Microsoft with its deep and broad ecosystem. While Hallam has designed and crafted custom software utilizing web, mobile and desktop technologies, good quality reliable data is the key to a successful solution. The challenge of quickly turning data into useful information for digestion by humans and machines has led Hallam to specialize in database design and process automation. Showing customers how leverage new technology to change and improve their business processes is one of the key drivers keeping Hallam coming back to the keyboard.