Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Database Administration - Second Edition

By : Ahmad Osama
Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Database Administration - Second Edition

By: Ahmad Osama

Overview of this book

Despite being the cloud version of SQL Server, Azure SQL Database differs in key ways when it comes to management, maintenance, and administration. This book shows you how to administer Azure SQL Database to fully benefit from its wide range of features and functionalities. Professional Azure SQL Database Administration begins by covering the architecture and explaining the difference between Azure SQL Database and the on-premise SQL Server to help you get comfortable with Azure SQL Database. You’ll perform common tasks such as migrating, backing up and restoring a SQL Server database to an Azure database. As you progress, you’ll understand how you can reduce costs, and manage and scale multiple SQL databases using elastic pools. You’ll also implement a disaster recovery solution using standard and active geo-replication. Whether it is learning different techniques to monitor and tune an Azure SQL Database or improving performance using in-memory technology, this book will enable you to make the most out of Azure SQL database features and functionality for data management solutions. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with key aspects of an Azure SQL Database instance, such as migration, backup restorations, performance optimization, high availability, and disaster recovery.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

SQL Graph Queries and Improvements

A graph database consists of nodes and edges. The nodes are the vertices, and edges represent the relationship between the two nodes. The graph databases are optimized for implementing hierarchies and many-to-many relationships, and to analyze interconnected data and relationships. This is difficult to implement in a relational database.

The graph database functionalities were introduced in SQL Server 2017.

Let's look at modeling a very popular use case for a graph database: a social media application. A social media application allows users to follow, like, post, comment, and tag other users. Let's look at a simple model that allows users to do this:

Figure 10.12: Social media model for following users

In the preceding diagram, the circles represent nodes and the lines represent edges or relationships. The relationship is "follows". The graph tells us that Amy follows Hudson, Hudson follows Kayla, Kayla follows Amy, Amy...