Upgrading a SQL FCI to Premium Storage in Azure Without Downtime

Recently I was asked by a client to upgrade their SQL Server Failover Cluster from standard storage to Azure premium storage with as little downtime as possible. Due to the fact that the SQL Server instance was clustered already this was actually a pretty straight forward process. The first step was to figure out which…

Connecting To SQL Server Running On An Azure VM

If you have setup a Windows Azure Virtual Machine running SQL Server you may have noticed that you might not be able to connect to the SQL Server running on the machine by using SQL Server Management Studio on your workstation (desktop, labtop, etc) from your home or office. This is normal and setup this…

Be Careful When Starting Up Azure VMs Running SQL Server

So Microsoft has done something pretty dumb with the Azure VMs which are running Microsoft SQL Server. By default the front end firewall (the one that allows or blocks traffic from the public Internet to the VMs) allows traffic to the default SQL Server port 1433. At first this is fine, until you change the…

Splitting Files for SQL DW

When doing data warehouse loads into SQL DW you’ll want to break your single large file that you extract into multiple smaller files in order to do loads into the SQL DW (via Azure Blob Storage) as fast as possible. There’s a few ways that you can do this. One way would be to handle…

Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting Becomes a Microsoft Silver Partner Again

I’m pleased to be able to announce that Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting has become a Microsoft Silver Partner for Cloud Platform (also known as Azure). This is an important milestone for DC&AC because it shows that Microsoft puts trust in us as a company, and that Microsoft has vetted us through our projects which […]