Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

Azure SQL MI Replication – New Possibilities for Hybrid Environments

As customers continue to have more applications deployed in Azure, it’s common that data from those on-premises applications has to be shared with the new cloud applications or vise-versa. A simple batched methodology may be suitable for table data that is rarely updated, but for data that changes frequently, this may introduce an unacceptably high latency and undermine any data concurrency, expected by the business users. One of the limitations of SQL Azure database is that it can’t support a SQL agent, so replication, while possible from on-premises to the cloud, is not available in the opposite direction. One solution is the use of the relatively new Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, SQL MI, that allows replication from the cloud replicated back to an on-premises SQL database.

SQL Server Objects as Software Artifacts

This post is provided by Premier Field Engineer JJ Jacob who takes a look at the benefits of SQL Server Objects as software artifacts.A recent customer engagement revealed several pain-points.  One of them is the issue of not being able to pinpoint the exact database schema the development team delivered to the production team. The issue ...

Using JOIN with MAX to write efficient queries

In this post, Senior Application Development Manager, Alexei Govorine,  demonstrates how to use SQL JOIN and MAX in a query.How to join two SQL tables and display the latest results.Recently a customer has asked me to help them with a query design. The question was how to join two tables and display the latest results from one of them in ...

PolyBase – How SQL Server does Big data!

In this post, Senior App Dev Manager Nayan Patel introduces SQL Server PolyBase and shares some insights from a recent engagement using the technology.I was recently involved in helping my customer complete a successful PoC around SQL Server 2016’s PolyBase feature.  They have invested a signification amount of budget and resources ...

SQL Server 2016 Express SP1 – Always Encrypted

This post is provided by Senior App Dev Manager, Chris Tjoumas who provides an overview of Always Encrypted with SQL Server 2016. Introduction In this post, I want to focus on the Always Encrypted security feature of SQL Server 2016 SP1, specifically with the Express edition. This post is motivated by a customer who was hoping to ...

mySQL, POSTgreSQL DBs as a Service

This post is from App Dev Manager, Omer Amin who spotlights mySQL and POSTgreSQL, both announced at BUILD this year.(image) If you missed the announcement at BUILD earlier this year, Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL provide fully-managed MySQL and PostgreSQL database as-a-service for easy development and deployment...

Random SQL Workload Generator

In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Bradley Ball  gives us a step-by-step overview of how to use SQL Server Random Workload Generator Many developers develop their own T-SQL, many DBA’s have to maintain that SQL.  If you are looking for a way to generate a workload against a SQL Server to practice performance ...