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The question of what cloud platform to choose for building an application confuses almost 90% of our startup customers. In all fairness, there are many players on the market of cloud vendors and many options they offer. If we had a proven solution of which cloud you should choose when you have a business in a specific field, a list of countries to release in, and a set of features to implement, then we would share it. However, we should […]

I recently needed to migrate an Azure SQL Database Managed Instance to an Azure VM running SQL Server. There were several reasons for this which included: Machine Learning Services was not available for processing R language libraries close to the database. Bulk loading CSV files were slower than expected because Managed Instances only supports the Full Recovery Model. PolyBase was not available for data mining data files located in Azure Data Lake Gen2 storage. The challenge that I faced was […]

During bulk data loads with an Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, we noticed a significant performance hit as we imported data into staging tables. It turns out a Managed Instance default file growth for data and files is 16 MB! Change your Managed Instance default file growth size now! With the database file growth set so low, SQL Server grinds to a snail’s pace when importing large amounts of data. In our case, I changed the file growth to something […]

As a Cloud Architect for DB Best Technology, with emphasis on the Azure platform, I’ve seen almost all of what the cloud has to offer. For the past 7 years, I’ve been helping customers develop and deploy their applications for Microsoft Azure. So when the project team at DB Best came to me for guidance on how to best deploy WordPress on Azure before going live, I was all in. I’d like to share my best practices and walk you […]

If you have been deploying SQL Server workloads to the Microsoft Azure platform using virtual machines, you may have noticed that not all virtual machines, solid-state drives, and network components are created equal. There might be issues in your deployment templates that could result in SQL Server not performing as well as expected. For example, in a presentation given by André Arko at StrangeLoop 2016, André claims that Netflix benchmarks AWS EC2 instances that they use for production and if […]

When customers feel the need for speed and size, Microsoft announced at Ignite a new service called Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. This service offering is now available public preview as of October 1, 2018. Think of this as cloud-based Oracle RAC for SQL Server or Amazon Aurora for SQL Server in terms of the ability to scale SQL Server up to 100 TB! Like Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft separated the Compute processing from the Storage so that you can […]

Microsoft is doubling down on Azure SQL Database Managed Instances (DMI) this year. There are some amazing Microsoft offers to provide a Platform-as-a-Service for running SQL Server on Azure. More importantly, there is a much higher degree of capability with DMI than what is available with Azure SQL Database DTU and vCore service levels. In this blog post, you will discover the most important reasons for migrating to Azure SQL Database Managed Instances. Also, you will learn how DB Best experts […]

One of the world’s largest distributors of non-food consumable products wanted to rationalize their data platform and business intelligence strategy. Their current IBM DB2 database system lacked repository to host historical audit related data, so they could hardly retrieve data from past years. Then we came up with an Azure cloud database solution that could store all the historical data and created Power BI reports on top of it. We performed the IBM DB2 Azure SQL Database migration as a […]

A major Health Department was running a data system that has been expanding over the years. Eventually, they ended up with a highly outdated and inefficient environment with thousands of Microsoft Access and SQL Server databases. Such an outdated system presents a number of risks such as performance, scalability, manageability, security issues and frequent database corruptions. This leads to revenue losses because of poor performance. Moreover, such environments are usually not cost-effective with increased operating expenses due to a great […]

A leading provider of business management solutions currently hosts many of their workloads using SQL Server databases on Azure. They faced a number of SQL Server database performance issues and needed an efficient solution to resolve them. We analyzed the customer’s system and delivered instructions with detailed descriptions. They covered all discovered issues and described the possible approaches to fix them. With our instructions, our customer achieved more than three times better overall query performance.