Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Managed Database Administration - Third Edition

By : Ahmad Osama, Shashikant Shakya
Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Managed Database Administration - Third Edition

By: Ahmad Osama, Shashikant Shakya

Overview of this book

Despite being the cloud version of SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance stands out in various aspects when it comes to management, maintenance, and administration. Updated with the latest Azure features, Professional Azure SQL Managed Database Administration continues to be a comprehensive guide for becoming proficient in data management. The book begins by introducing you to the Azure SQL managed databases (Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance), explaining their architecture, and how they differ from an on-premises SQL server. You will then learn how to perform common tasks, such as migrating, backing up, and restoring a SQL Server database to an Azure database. As you progress, you will study how you can save costs and manage and scale multiple SQL databases using elastic pools. You will also implement a disaster recovery solution using standard and active geo-replication. Finally, you will explore the monitoring and tuning of databases, the key features of databases, and the phenomenon of app modernization. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the key aspects of an Azure SQL database and Azure SQL managed instance, including migration, backup restorations, performance optimization, high availability, and disaster recovery.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Alternate ways of scaling SQL Managed Instance

We have seen the steps for scaling up SQL Managed Instance resources with management operations. Here, we will be learning more about alternate ways to scale a managed instance.

The Business Critical service tier of SQL Managed Instance comes with an in-built read replica and that can be used as a read-only source for your analytics application. An internal read replica in Business Critical SQL Managed Instance runs with the same compute and storage resources similar to its primary node and it can help in off-loading a read-only workload without paying more for extra resources. The internal read-replica server is not visible on the Azure portal and hence needs to be accessed using the ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly flag.

The following is the high-level architecture for offloading a read-only workload to the internal read replica in the Business Critical service tier:

Read scale-out architecture for the Business Critical service tier

Figure 7.66: Read scale-out architecture...