>> When you create your first Azure SQL Database,
you're going to have to choose between DTU and vCore.
You're also going to have to choose between basic,
standard, and premium within the DTU model.
Learn more in this episode of Data Exposed.
[MUSIC].
Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman and welcome to
this episode of Data Exposed MVP Edition.
Today I'm joined by Matt Gordon.
Thanks for joining us today.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> Before we get started, Matt,
why don't you start by telling us
a little bit about yourself and what you do.
>> Yeah. So I work for Insight Digital Innovation,
which doesn't really roll off the tongue,
so we go Insight DI,
for sure, they gave me this snazzy shirt.
I'm an architect for them,
which means I do a little bit of everything.
I was the DBA for a long time and then when I got into consulting,
you just have to learn a little bit about a lot of things.
So that's what I do for work, and then on the side,
I get to drive race cars once in a great while.
That's a lot of fun.
>> Yeah, driving race car as well.
I'm excited to see
how driving race cars and SQL might fit together.
Now, today we're talking about creating
your first Azure SQL Database,
and when you do that,
you oftentimes have to make a choice pretty far up
front between DTU or vCore.
Today I think you wanted to focus on
DTU and I wanted to start with just
asking you if you could explain what is a DTU?
>> Not really. It's a unit of the more of those you have,
the faster things will go,
the more resources you have.
But the reference that I always go to
that's a great jump for somebody who has no idea.
Andy Mallon, he's on Twitter as AMTWO.
He has an article on sqlperformance.com that's called,
What the heck is a DTU,
that is the best intro that I
ever saw to put together what those are
and then you can plug that into the workload that you're
trying to run and see how many of those you might need.
>> Awesome. We'll be sure to put
a link in our description to that article.
Is it an article or video?
>> Article.
>> Article, What the heck is a DTU?
Now, when I go into the portal and I
look at some of my options as far as DTU goes,
can you show us what that looks like and walk us through
why I might pick a different tier or how I might do that?
>> I can do that. As you would see from seeing the screen,
we're going to start with basic.
That's the lowest tier.
It's named very well.
It is a very basic tier.
You'll see as we get into some of the higher tiers,
we're going to have a lot of options down here,
a lot of dials we can spin, and a lot of those
will make the cost counters spin here as well.
Here we can adjust the size and that's it.
We're limited to five DTUs and there
is a brief definition of what a DTU is here,
but Andy's article is a little more fun to read actually too,
but also really, really good.
But, basic this is it.
>> Awesome. Thanks Matt.
Now, basic only two gigs,
less than five bucks a month,
what really can I do with something in the basic tier?
Is this just for DevTest?
>> It's mostly for that, sure,
and you would think by the name and I even know
some shops that I go to they won't put
any production workloads on basic at all.
Because they just say, well, it's basic, it's not for that.
I did a cognitive services sentiment analysis thing
for a soccer podcast here in the states.
Where basically we were doing sentiment analysis for
the English top flight league
and so it was 20 clubs every match day,
and we were monitoring tweets,
and then doing sentiment analysis on those and
ranking the tweets by the sentiment of the fans.
We were ranking the teams by how happy or sad their fans were.
We stored all that on a basic database
and in an average weekend
we were throwing around 20 million tweets
at it and basic handled it.
Which was great because I was paying for it
out of my own pocket, so $5 was nice.
But it handled it like a pro.
So there's more performance here than you
think obviously for heavy,
heavy workloads, that's not the answer,
but you can get more out of this than you think.
>> Awesome. That's a pretty cool example.
>> It was fun. But like I said,
basic is not for everybody.
So let's chat standard here a bit.
You'll note we've got one change here,
so here we just had one slider size,
standard, we have two.
We can increase our max size up
to 250 gigs and you'll
note as I change the size, it costs the same.
It's a flat $15 a month at 10 DTUs.
But as you increase the DTUs,
the cost counter goes up and
you'll see how that works as I HOP few here.
As you go down,
you'll also notice it makes a slight change
to right there as we hit a 100 DTUs,
we also get access to a terabyte of data here as well.
So basic and standard are similar.
Standard is like it says,
normal performance requirements,
it's going to fit the bill most of the time.
Premium, that's where you go
when you've got an I/O intensive workload,
or sometimes when I
have a customer come to me and they'll say like,
"We've got always on availability groups,
On-premises everywhere, and we want to move
all those in Azure and save a bunch of money."
Well, putting a bunch of those on VMs
probably isn't going to save a bunch of money.
But the architecture under this tier, very, very similar
to the way and always on AG functions.
So if they're trying to get that level of availability,
and trust, and those sorts of things,
I usually direct them here because I think that's going
to position them better for the future.
But as you see here, back on standard,
we hit the cap of 3,000 DTUs,
here we get up to 4,000.
That obviously comes with a price.
We can also bump up to four terabytes here as well.
We do have the ability to create replicas to scale out
our reads as well and that's the first time
we've seen that here in these three tiers.
So that's the brief tour.
>> Cool. Thanks Matt.
This is a great overview of getting
acquainted one with the different options in the portal,
as well as how you might choose between some of them.
Now, I did notice that as you're sliding around,
the cost varies significantly, whether you're going from
$5 to thousands of dollars a month,
how do you decide between
the different service tiers and the different cost options,
and do you have any tips for our viewers?
>> Yeah. As the classic DBA/consultant answer goes,
it depends and it certainly does here.
Like I said, basic, I do have customers using that
for Prod applications that are small,
that don't need to do a lot and that's fine.
If you have somebody coming from
the higher end On-prem and they want that experience,
but they want the Platform-as-a-Service thing,
premium tier if they want a license by the DTU,
or pay by that,
that's going to make sense for them.
But it's really how much performance do you need,
how much size do you need?
Because as we saw those size caps
changes as you adjust settings there as well.
But it really depends on what they're trying to do and
how much performance they need to get out of it.
The nice thing is, and usually what I'll tell customers
that are brand new to Platform-as-a-Service stuff,
is we're going to start out low and walk them through what I just
did there because a lot of the times
the DBAs that are really new to it, they're nervous.
They're like, "Well, what if we started
up and it's not fast enough?"
We can just adjust that and then you
get the performance you need when you need it.
That is an adjustment from
the On-prem mindset but I I tend to like it.
>> Thanks, Matt. I really like what you're saying there,
that it's different from
the On-prem world as in the sense that like you don't
necessarily need to go and over-provision just in case.
You can scale up, scale down as you need,
whether that's on a daily basis or
just as you get started figuring out what your workload is.
So that's a great tip.
Thanks so much for being with us on
the show today. It's been great fun.
We'll include some links for our viewers
in the description and we're going to
do another episode where we dive
into the other side of the service tiers,
which is really the vCore model.
So we hope you'll stay tuned with
us in the next episode to learn more.
Thanks for joining us on Data Exposed.
[MUSIC]