Database maintenance thoughts with Azure SQL databases

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As DBA, your priority is to ensure your data are consistent, safely backed up and you get steady performance of your database. In on-prem environments, these tasks are generally performed through scheduled jobs including backups, check integrity and index / statistics maintenance tasks.

But moving databases to the cloud in Azure (and others) tells a different story. Indeed, even if the same concern and tasks remain, some of them are under the responsibility of the Cloud provider and some other ones not. If you’re working with Azure SQL databases – like me – some questions raise very quickly on this topic and it was my motivation to write this write-up. I would like to share with you some new experiences by digging into the different maintenance items. If you have a different story to tell, please feel free to comment and to share your own experience!

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Availability Group 2017 Direct seeding and updated default path policy

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A couple of days ago, I ran into an issue when adding a new database in direct seeding mode that led me to reconsider refreshing my skills on this feature. Going through the AG database wizard for adding database, I faced the following error message …

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Mitigating Scalar UDF’s procedural code performance with SQL 2019 and Scalar UDF Inlining capabilities

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A couple of days ago, I read the write-up of my former colleague @FranckPachot about refactoring procedural code to SQL. This is recurrent subject in the database world and I was interested in transposing this article to SQL Server because it was about refactoring a Scalar-Valued function to a SQL view. The latter one is a great alternative when it comes performance but something new was shipped with SQL Server 2019 and could address (or at least could mitigate) this recurrent scenario.

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