1. Understanding Azure SQL DB Service Tiers
Warner Chaves
SQL MCM / MVP
SQLTurbo.com
Pythian.com

2. Our Sponsors

3. Bio SQL Server DBA for 10 years.
Previously an L3 DBA at HP, now a Principal Consultant at Pythian in Ottawa Ontario.
SQL Server MCM and MVP.
Blog: sqlturbo.com
Company site: pythian.com

4. Agenda
GOAL: provide an introduction and overview of the Azure SQL Database service.
We’ll cover:
How to sign up.
Navigating the portal.
The different service levels.
New features coming cloud first.

5. Signing up!
Go here:
You’ll need to put in your info but you won’t get charged until after the trial month if you don’t cancel.

6. What is it? The SQL database as a service offering on Azure (OLTP).
Fully managed by MS as part of Azure.
It’s not a full instance. Many features that you’re used to don’t exist because it’s fully managed.
Used to be 2 size based tiers, now it’s 3 Service Level based tiers.

7. Before and After Before: Web and Business. Based purely on size.
Now: 3 service tiers and sub tiers.
BASIC S0 S1 S2 S3 P1 P2 P3

8. Basic Size Limit: 2GB. Point-in-time Restore: 7 days.
DR: Geo-Restore to another Azure region.
Auditing allowed.
Performance: 5 DTU.

9. Standard Size Limit: 250GB. Point-in-time Restore: 14 days.
10 DTU S1
20 DTU S2
50 DTU S3
100 DTU
Size Limit: 250GB.
Point-in-time Restore: 14 days.
DR: Geo-Restore, Standard Geo-replication.
Auditing allowed.
Performance: DTU.

10. Premium Size Limit: 500GB. Point-in-time Restore: 35 days.
DR: Geo-Restore, Standard or Active Geo-replication.
Parallelism.
Columnstores.
Auditing allowed.
Performance: DTU. P1
100 DTU P2
200 DTU P3
1000 DTU

11. Standard vs Active Geo-Replication
RTO < 2h (30 secs on V12)
RPO < 30m (5 secs on V12)
Active
RPO < 5m (5 secs on V12)
Active provides failover control.
Active provides up to 4 read-only replicas.

12. Official Pricing List For the official published price please check:
The price can change depending on your specific agreements with Microsoft.

13. Demo: Walkthrough Azure Portal and SSMS experience

14. Demo: Point-in-Time Restore

15. DTU? Database throughput unit.
A comparison unit of integrated database performance.
Blend of CPU + Data IO + Log IO + Memory.
Based on an internal OLTP benchmark from the Azure team.

16. Tier DTUs Tier DTU Max Threads Max Sessions Benchmark Throughput Basic5 30
300
16600 trx/hour S0 10 60
600
521 trx/min S1 20 90
900
934 trx/min S2 50
120
1200
2570 trx/min S3
100
200
2400
5100 trx/min P1
125
105 trx/sec P2
250
400
4800
228 trx/sec P3
1000
1600
19200
735 trx/sec

17. Demo: Basic vs S1 comparison

18. Cloud-first
MS is now deploying features on Azure SQL that are NOT in the “box” version of SQL Server:
Dynamic Data Masking.
Row-Level Security.
ALTER COLUMN ONLINE.
TDE on all editions.
TRUNCATE PARTITION.
Upcoming: SQL Query Store.

19. Demo: Dynamic Data Masking

20. Future ahead Elastic database pools Azure SQL Datawarehouse
Check videos of the sessions from Ignite 2015 on channel9.microsoft.com

21. QA?