Azure SQL Database makes scaling compute straightforward. But troubleshooting becomes more complicated when several things happen simultaneously: A scale operation remains IN_PROGRESS. A cancel...

A growing Change Tracking table is a symptom. The useful question is whether cleanup is slow, blocked, or behaving as configured. Change Tracking is a lightweight mechanism for applications tha...

A database can recover in seconds while an application remains unavailable for much longer. Brief connectivity interruptions are expected failure modes that cloud applications should be designe...

A query can consume very little CPU and still keep a pipeline waiting for hours. A pipeline activity that normally finishes in minutes suddenly starts taking hours. Nothing obvious has change...

Before changing MAXDOP or adding compute, answer one question: Is the database executing work, compiling work, or waiting for work? When an Azure SQL Database approaches its CPU or worker limit...

A few extra milliseconds during a stress test While working on a support case, our customer was running stress tests against an Azure SQL Database. They noticed a small but interesting variation: o...

While working on a support case, our customer told us that a stored procedure was taking longer than expected. “It’s fast on the other server,” they explained. Our customer was executing the same s...

One of the advantages of Azure SQL Database is the ability to scale compute resources without managing the underlying infrastructure. Changing from 4 vCores to 8 vCores can be only a few clicks or ...

In our recently delivered session, “SQL Is Slow — What Can Query Store and SSMS Copilot Uncover?”, we demonstrated step by step how to investigate a performance problem by combining Query Store with ...

When an application connected to Azure SQL Database becomes slow or starts timing out, one of the first questions is usually: Is the database running out of CPU? It's a reasonable starting po...