Book Image

Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

By : Neil Mackenzie
Book Image

Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

By: Neil Mackenzie

Overview of this book

The Windows Azure platform is Microsoft's Platform-as-a-Service environment for hosting services and data in the cloud. It provides developers with on-demand computing, storage, and service connectivity capabilities that facilitate the hosting of highly scalable services in Windows Azure datacenters across the globe. This practical cookbook will show you advanced development techniques for building highly scalable cloud-based services using the Windows Azure platform. It contains over 80 practical, task-based, and immediately usable recipes covering a wide range of advanced development techniques for building highly scalable services to solve particular problems/scenarios when developing these services on the Windows Azure platform. Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book starts by explaining the various access control mechanisms used in the Windows Azure platform. Next you will see the advanced features of Windows Azure Blob storage, Windows Azure Table storage, and Windows Azure Queues. The book then dives deep into topics such as developing Windows Azure hosted services, using Windows Azure Diagnostics, managing hosted services with the Service Management API, using SQL Azure and the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. You will see how to use several of the latest features such as VM roles, Windows Azure Connect, startup tasks, and the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Measuring SQL Azure usage


A SQL Azure database resides on a physical server shared with many other SQL Azure databases. This sharing leads to resource constraints on the maximum size and operational throughput of a SQL Azure database. No data can be written to a SQL Azure database that has reached its maximum size. Connections are terminated when operational throughput limits are breached. It is therefore important that SQL Azure usage is measured to avoid the consequences of hitting resource constraints. SQL Azure exposes various dynamic management views that can be queried to measure resource usage.

SQL Azure allocates one partition for a table, and one partition for each non-clustered index in a database. As SQL Azure manages the physical allocation of a database, it does not provide operations supporting partition management. However, the sys.dm_db_partition_stats dynamic management view contains one row for each partition allocated in the database. Consequently, the view can be queried...