How to view SQL Azure Business Critical Tier - Qurom, replics, etc.

John Allen 0 Reputation points
2024-04-23T14:42:05.92+00:00

We just scaled from General Purpose Tier to Business Critical in our main production Azure SQL Database (not Managed Instance). Everything is running fine, and I can connect to the read only replica successfully. Besides initiated a manual failover, I am not finding a way to "see" the replicas/quorum status, location or anything. I know the documentation says it is behind the scenes, but I'd like to see where the extra cost of this tier is. thanks.

Azure SQL Database

2 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Dillon Silzer 54,646 Reputation points
    2024-04-23T16:43:35.42+00:00

    Hi John,

    Based on your question "I'd like to see where the exstra cost of this tier is" I'd recommend reading the following article:

    Business Critical Tier of Azure SQL Services

    https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/6434/business-critical-tier-of-azure-sql-services/

    John Miner states:

    "The Business Critical tier is ideal for heavy workloads that process a large number of transactions that require fast response times. This offering is more expensive and can scale up to 80 cores. Even though I have not written yet about Managed Instance, this offering was included in the performance testing."

    The article goes over the differences between the tiers. Hopefully this gives you some good insight into the differences.

    Additional Information

    Premium and Business Critical service tier (Azure SQL)

    As an extra benefit, the local storage availability model includes the ability to redirect read-only Azure SQL connections to one of the secondary replicas. This feature is called Read Scale-Out. It provides 100% additional compute capacity at no extra charge to off-load read-only operations, such as analytical workloads, from the primary replica.

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/high-availability-sla?view=azuresql&tabs=azure-powershell#premium-and-business-critical-service-tier-locally-redundant-availability

    Use read-only replicas to offload read-only query workloads

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/read-scale-out?view=azuresql

    If this is helpful please accept answer.

  2. Oury Ba-MSFT 16,391 Reputation points Microsoft Employee
    2024-04-24T16:20:32.25+00:00

    @John Allen Thank you for reaching out.

    Adding on top of Dillon Silzer's answer.

    Under the hood we run 4 replicas for Business Critical and hence higher cost. Business critical offers best performance as data is on local disk.

    We provide overall Business Critical price and that already factors in the cost of all the related components used under the hood.

    hope that helps.

    Regards,

    Oury