Speed IT Up

December 6th-8th, 2022 Belgrade

Powered by
 Powered by

Tips & tricks for the success

with Azure SQL Managed Instance

Niko Neugebauer
Product Manager @ Microsoft
Niko Neugebauer
• A Senior Program Manager for SQLMI at Microsoft, in his
previous roles for over 20 years he helped customers
successfully build, migrate and optimize Microsoft Data
solutions in OLTP & OLAP markets.

• A community leader, he is leading Portuguese Data

Platform User Group for over 11 years and he organized the
first international SQLSaturday (#78 Lisbon). A regular speaker
at major events, such as SQLBits, PASS Summit, etc.
 Powered by

Agenda
• Intro
• Backups from SQL MI to SQL Server 2022
• Hybrid Link
• Performance
• Fast Provisioning
• Start/Stop
• ADLS Virtualization
• License-free Geo-Dr
Azure SQL
The family of SQL cloud to edge databases

SQL Server on Azure Azure SQL Azure SQL Azure SQL

Virtual Machines Managed Instance Database Edge
Best for lift and shift Best for modernizing Best for supporting Best for extending
and/or workloads existing apps modern cloud apps apps to IoT edge
requiring OS-level access

Azure is the cloud that knows SQL Server best

©Microsoft Corporation
 Which Azure SQL offering is right for you?
Lift & Shift, App Modernization, App Innovation
Control Capabilities

Full control and capabilities of SQL Server

instance
Yes
Customer • OS level access SQL Server
on Azure VMs
Managed • SQL Server versions 2008 - 2019
• Patching/Upgrades
• App or other services colocation

No

Fully managed SQL Server engine as a service

Yes
• Native restore and log shipping
Azure SQL
• Cross-DB transactions and Linked Server Managed Instance
• Service Broker and Event Notifications

Microsoft • SQL Agent and Transactional Replication

.NET CLR integration and ML Services
Managed
•

No

Fully managed SQL database as a service Yes Azure SQL

• A database scoped programming model Database with
Hyperscale

©Microsoft Corporation
Service tiers – Deployment options
Hardware options
General purpose Business critical
Intel Broadwell CPU
Standard
80 vCores/5.1Gb per vCore
Workloads that require low latency,
Most business workloads fast recovery, and a readable
secondary Premium-series (Intel Ice Lake CPU)
Premium 80 vCores/7 Gb per vCore
Memory optimized –
64 vCores/13.6 per vCore

Resource limits

• Memory
• Max Log Size
• I/O throughput and latency
• Size of Tempdb
• Max concurrent workers
• Backup Retention
SQL MI New HW Generations

Standard-series (Gen 5) Premium-series Premium-series Mem Optimized

• CPU: Intel Broadwell, Skylake and • CPU: Latest 3rd Gen Intel 8370C • CPU: Latest 3rd Gen Intel 8370C
Cascade Lake, 2.3-2.5 GHz (Ice Lake), 2.8 GHz (Ice Lake), 2.8 GHz
• vCore range: 4 – 80 • vCore range: 4 – 80 • vCore range: 4 - 64

• Memory / vCore: 5.1 GB • Memory / vCore: 7 GB • Memory / vCore: 13.6 GB

• Max instance memory: 408 GB • Max instance memory: 560 GB • Max instance memory: 870 GB

• Max instance storage • Max instance storage • Max instance storage

• General Purpose: 16 TB • General Purpose: 16 TB • General Purpose: 16 TB
• Business Critical: 4 TB • Business Critical: 5.5 TB • Business Critical: 16 TB
 Modernize SQL Server apps on Azure
Azure SQL Managed Instance is best for
modernizing existing apps at scale

Operates on the Provides maximum Fully-managed Secures data at New! Enables SQL
latest / compatibility with service optimized compute and Server running
“evergreen” SQL Server on-prem for DBA networking levels anywhere to get
version of SQL for low-cost app productivity * connected to Azure for
modernization auto-DR, read scale, and
online migration
scenarios

* projected ROI 230% over 3 years according to Forrester Total Economic Impact study
 Evergreen version of SQL

Get rid of perpetual Newest / Azure-only

SQL major version features
upgrades

This is the LAST SQL Leverage latest SQL

Server upgrade that you Server innovation
ever perform available as “cloud-first”
 Fully-managed for DBA productivity

Industry-leading high availability (99.99%, financially backed up)

Industry-leading support by SQL Server Engineering team 24x7

Geo-replicated automatic-backups with built-in point-in-time restore and configurable short and
long-time retention

Easy to configure, auto-managed disaster recovery 50+ Azure regions

Automatic full stack software updates without downtime

Built-in compliance

Advanced Threat Protection

Monitoring at scale and automatic tuning

 Reserved Capacity for Azure SQL DB & MI
Up to 55% Up to 80%
Reserve Azure SQL MI resources in advance savings2 savings3
and save up to 33%1
• Budget and forecast better with upfront payment
for one-year or three-year terms
• Get prioritized compute capacity in Azure
regions
• Exchange or cancel reservations as your needs
evolve
• Scale up or down within a performance tier and
License With Azure Hybrid Reserved Instances
region with auto-fit included Benefit with Azure Hybrid
• Move SaaS apps between elastic pools and Benefit
single databases and keep your reserved
instance benefit Total Economic Impact

1 Savingsbased on eight vCore Managed Instance Business Critical in East US Region, running 730 hours per month. Savings are calculated from full price (license included) against base rate (applying Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server), which excludes
Software Assurance cost for SQL Server Enterprise edition, which may vary based on EA agreement. Actual savings may vary based on region, instance size and performance tier. Prices as of May 2018, subject to change.
2 Savings based on eight vCore SQL Database Managed Instance Business Critical in West 2 US Region, running 730 hours per month. Savings are calculated from on demand full price (license included) against base rate with Azure Hybrid Benefit plus 3-
year reserved capacity commitment. Savings excludes Software Assurance cost for SQL Server Enterprise edition, which may vary based on EA agreement. Actual savings may vary based on region, instance size and performance tier. Prices as of May 2018,
subject to change.
Azure Dev/Test pricing

Dev/test pricing for SQL Database is

billed at the same rate as Azure Hybrid
Benefit pricing, with savings of up to
55% on License Included prices.

Dev/Test pricing available for vCore-

based deployment options
(SQL DB and SQL MI)
 17 Updates
in the year 2020 for
Azure SQL Managed Instance
 25 Updates
in the year 2021 for
Azure SQL Managed Instance
 28 Updates
so far in the 10 months of 2022
for Azure SQL Managed Instance
 Delivered
30

25 28
25
20

19
15
17
10

5 8

0
2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
 Delivered
30

25 28
25
20

19
15
17
10

5 8

0
2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
Powered by

Tips & Tricks for SQL Managed Instance

Out there and back
 Failing back to SQL Server 2022 instance
DR = failover + failback
Offline failback Online failback
MI Link MI Link
failover failover

MI Link
BACKUP DATABASE
RESTORE DATABASE MyDB failover
FROM URL = … TO URL = …
Azure Storage WITH COPY_ONLY

Available with SQL Server 2022 RTM

SQL MI Performance
Demos
Lower your total cost of
ownership in the cloud
 10x
Before Now

Time to create the first

4 - 6 hours ~30 minutes
instance in a new subnet
This is just a start..
• Faster create for any instance
• Faster update and delete instance
NOTE:

✓ The first instance in an empty subnet

✓ 4 and 8 CPU vCores

✓ Default Maintenance window

✓ Standard-series HW
NOTE:

✓ Available only for

General Purpose Service Tier
Demo
SQL MI Start/Stop
Data Virtualization
 • ADLS/Blob Storage
• Most common file formats
• Read-only currently

Parquet, CSV, JSON

--Number of confirmed Covid-19 cases per country/territory during the first pandemic year:
SELECT countries_and_territories, sum(cases)
FROM OPENROWSET( BULK 'abs://[email protected]/curated/covid-19/ecdc_cases/latest/ecdc_cases.parquet’,
FORMAT='PARQUET' ) AS [CovidCaseExplorer]
WHERE year = '2020' group by countries_and_territories order by sum(cases) desc
• For rapid assumption testing, data exploration, non-standard reports
-> ETL
• Terabytes of diverse data
• Query it at rest with SQL MI as data hub
• Familiar T-SQL language
• No ETLs, data duplication
• Data always up to date
• Storage cost in check

• Migrate on-prem OLAP into Azure with the most reuse of the existing
setup
• Without complex polybase setup
• Without adapting for MPP
• Use ML scenarios
 evolution of Polybase

Shared technology SQL Managed Instance

Partition elimination
Predicate pushdown
Landscape diagram

Local data

External tables
License-free Failover Groups
 Powered by

What does License free GeoDR offer?

• Idea behind License free GeoDR is to remove the license cost for the secondary
instance that does not service any read workloads – these instances are so called
Standby geo replicas.
• We want to remove extra costs and improve the DR experience for the customers
• This will also bring the service on par with SQL Server and Azure SQL VM.

SQL license Cost License included total cost

With License Free,

Infrastructure Cost customer only pays for the
infrastructure

Cost structure
 Powered by

Conclusion
• Failover rights benefit removes the license cost from Standby replica
• Failover rights is the benefit on a Failover group level, not instance level, but always applied on the
Secondary
• We support both AHB and PAYG customers
• Benefit for AHB users is getting the licenses back
• Benefit for PAYG users is getting a direct discount
• We support mismatched configurations between the Primary and the Secondary
• The benefit is fully given for all vCores the Secondary holds
• You cannot benefit from Failover rights and AHB at the same time
• To be careful with Failover scenarios when a Secondary instance (covered with Failover rights)
becomes the Primary, as it will lose the benefit and potentially stay unprotected
Demo
License-free Geo-DR
 Powered by

Head
Subhead

Main text Example Example Example Example

Example
Thank you
Powered by