Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Resetting an Azure SQL Database Admin Password

    This is likely something that most people know, but it was a bit confusing for me. This post is really here to remind me and help cement this in my mind.

    I went to connect to a QA database that I don’t use very often, and for some reason, I couldn’t remember the password. I tried a number of them, but none worked. Not the best situation to find yourself in.

    I then decided to just reset the password and went to the database Overview. This is what I saw:

    2019-11-26 17_53_06-Sandbox (dkranchapps_Sandbox) - Microsoft Azure

    I could have sworn there was a “Reset” option here. I even tried searching a few places and there were people that mentioned there being a reset. Why wasn’t I seeing one?

    Because I was in the wrong place. Reading closer a post on the Tech Community, I see that I need to be in the SQL Server server blade, not the database.

    Once I realized that, I clicked over to that spot in the portal. Looking at my SQL Server, and I see the Reset.

    2019-11-26 17_56_42-dkranchstaging - Microsoft Azure

    Slightly confusing, and certainly something I hope I remember from here, but if a new developer is working with databases, they might not realize this.

  • A Quick Look at Travel

    I was experimenting with visualizations the other day, and started playing with SandDance, a tool from Microsoft that you can use in Power BI or Azure Data Studio. I’ll write more, but I loaded up a quick look at the last couple years of travel for me. Here are airlines v destinations:

    2019-11-25 16_02_17-SandDance_ unitedactivity.csv - Sample Data - Azure Data Studio

    Since I live in Denver, obviously that should be my top destination, but a few others are surprising. I go to London quite a bit, but LAX was surprising to me. It shouldn’t be, as I’ve flown through there quite a few times to get to London.

    I’ll write more about this later, but I thought this was an interesting visualization.

  • Take the 2020 State of Database DevOps survey

    It’s still 2019, but we’re looking forward to 2020 and wonder how your world has changed since our survey last year. There are a number of questions and this will probably take 20 minutes to complete, but you have a couple incentives:

    • Completed surveys donate $1 to UNICEF
    • You could win a 64GB iPod Air

    You can take the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/FWCVCBJ

    Feel free to pass this along to your friends as well.

  • How Serverless is Working in Azure SQL Database

    When Azure SQL Database introduced the serverless option, I decided to try it. I moved one of my databases to the tier, though I had to move to a vCore model instead of the basic DTU setup. I was nervous, but I did it back in May.

    Since then, I’ve only used the database sparingly, so I haven’t noticed much change, but the billing is lower. In October, the first database I moved over here cost me US$0.35. In fact, the last three months, this has cost me US$6.90

    2019-11-25 11_18_07-Cost Management_ VS_MSDN - Cost analysis - Microsoft Azure

    Let’s compare that with the 3 months until I went serverless. When I look at this, I see US$15.45, which is what I’d expect. About $5 a month.

    2019-11-25 11_20_33-Cost Management_ VS_MSDN - Cost analysis - Microsoft Azure

    On a low usage database, this has certainly saved me money. Would it be different if I used this more? That is harder to determine, and I need to run an experiment with something I use more often. I’ve tried to manage my Azure credits wisely, and with making a few changes across the last six months, I was slightly worried about the cost of this vCore system.

    Last month I did adjust this down to a 1 hour delay before shutting down the system, so if you had a normal vCore database and could cut down on usage during some periods, this certainly might help you.

    The downside? Today I spun up a db, and saw this for about 15 minutes.

    2019-11-25 10_59_39-SQL databases - Microsoft Azure

    Now great, as this caused me SSMS issues as I tried to connect. More an SSMS issue, but still annoying.

    So far serverless has worked well for some test databases, which is where I think is shines.