Azure-Sql-General-Purpose

Tag: azure-sql-general-purpose

All Eyes on the Wrong Problem: How Mitigations Distract from Real Performance Pain

All Eyes on the Wrong Problem: How Mitigations Distract from Real Performance Pain

🔥 UPDATE: Microsoft has announced the general availability of the Next-gen General Purpose service tier for Azure SQL Managed Instance, which includes improvements to I/O latency, IOPS, and transaction log throughput. This post describes the original General Purpose blob storage. You don't want that.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from helping folks manage data in Azure is this: if you’ve got a truly terrible problem you’d rather people didn’t notice, a great way to hide it is by educating your support staff and users about something bad but not AS terrible— something with a small mitigation—and constantly refocusing them on that.

The user base— and even your own support staff— will think that anyone who talks about the bigger issue just doesn’t understand how to fix the “known” problem.

This is the story of Azure General Purpose storage for Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database.

Continue reading

Buyer Beware: Azure SQL Managed Instance Storage Is Regularly as Slow as 60 Seconds

Buyer Beware: Azure SQL Managed Instance Storage Is Regularly as Slow as 60 Seconds

🔥 UPDATE: Microsoft has announced the general availability of the Next-gen General Purpose service tier for Azure SQL Managed Instance, which includes improvements to I/O latency, IOPS, and transaction log throughput. This post describes the original General Purpose blob storage. You don't want that.

What are your stories of unbelievably bad performance from cloud vendors? I’ll go first. For years, Azure SQL Managed Instance’s General Purpose Tier has documented ‘approximate’ storage latency as being “5-10 ms.” This week they added a footnote: “This is an average range. Although the vast majority of IO request durations will fall under the top of the range, outliers which exceed the range are possible.”

Continue reading