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Azure SQL Blog
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Reduce costs by lowering the auto-pause delay for serverless compute in Azure SQL Database

Morgan_Oslake's avatar
Morgan_Oslake
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Oct 07, 2024

Azure SQL Database serverless automatically scales compute based on workload demand and bills for compute used per second.  In the General Purpose tier, serverless also provides an option to automatically pause the database during idle usage periods when only storage related costs are billed.  When workload activity returns, the database is automatically resumed.

 

Customers choosing to enable auto-pausing can specify the auto-pause delay as part of the serverless configuration.  The auto-pause delay is the length of time the database must be idle before auto-pausing.  The lower the auto-pause delay and the more frequently auto-pausing occurs, the greater the potential compute cost savings. 

 

We are pleased to announce the minimum configurable auto-pause delay has decreased from 1 hour to 15 minutes providing even greater price optimization opportunities for serverless databases.  The auto-pause delay can be configured for new or existing databases using the Azure portal or via APIs including PowerShell and Azure CLI.  For more information, please see Azure SQL Database serverless.

Updated Oct 08, 2024
Version 2.0
  • m60freeman's avatar
    m60freeman
    Brass Contributor

    This is good. On the other side, we could use having the restart from a pause be much faster or at least come back with the cache intact.