Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Uh, chilling out at home, teaching training classes, uh, getting ready to go on a Mexican cruise on Friday.

Uh, and in the meantime, let's go through some of your top voted SQL Server questions and Azure SQL DB questions from over at Poll Gab.

The top voted one is from NeedForSpeedRound, who asks, "What do you recommend for statistics maintenance on terabyte scale tables with billions of rows? We've gone five years with neither scheduled nor automatic stats updates, and it hurts." Well, so that's interesting.

If you don't have automatic stats updates, that means one of two things.

And it's pretty convenient.

So it's using effectively Azure SQL's SQL Server Enterprise point in time restore.

So that's awesome.

And another You give it a new name, you say sandbox, restore to whatever, and you can uninstall PTEs.

The same thing that I was saying, but very nicely summarized that just to upgrade the license of the firewall, they have to upgrade the size of the VM also.

Yeah, there were similar things with Azure having to do with like the original Azure SQL product.

I mean, it was Azure SQL managed instance SQL, where if you wanted a certain amount of performance, you had to upgrade the amount of memory, even if you didn't need it or vice versa, because they had these very cookie cutter sizes and you just had to force your use case into that cookie cutter if you wanted to use that solution.

Um, and I get it from, from like the cloud provider standpoint, they're like, no, these are the t-shirt sizes.

You have to make yourself fit in one of these t-shirts.

They act as dynamic variables in your M code that allow developers to alter connection strings like server names, file paths, start and end dates, or environment settings across dev, test, and production without manually rewriting individual queries.

For example, if your report needs to transition from a local test SQL database to a production Azure SQL server, you simply update the server parameter value in Power Query or within the Power BI service dataset settings, and all referencing queries update instantly.

A frequent scenario on the PL 300 exam tests your ability to choose the right parameter type based on specific business requirements.

A massive exam trap involves confusing Power Query parameters with what-if parameters and field parameters because all three introduce dynamic behavior, but they operate at completely different layers of Power BI.

To me, at Microsoft, there's two canonical examples of crypto agility.

One is Azure SQL DB or SQL Server with Always Encrypted, and then the other one-

Uh-huh

... is the, uh, Open Office XML for- file format, um, which you use to encrypt documents in Office.

So the way it works in Azure SQL DB, which to me is a beautiful and simple way of doing it, it's also very, very fast.

If you have a look at the ciphertext in, um, an Always Encrypted cell, the first byte is always a one, and that's the version number.

And that basically means AES 256 cipher block chaining with a SHA256 hash, um, as a, like an integrity check over the, over the data.

Yeah.

And, um, is there also, um, cases when you say I, I put my data into Dataverse or Azure SQL, or did you ever use SharePoint list?

No, you can, right? Because, uh, SharePoint is going to give you what? SharePoint is going to give you a way for user to basically come to a place which is familiar to them because they are already using SharePoint.

But now you wanted to build something which is going to get data from outside of your SharePoint system.

I always used to say that when I did my NERCSIP certification, like the sole idea that one is more important than the other carries some weight, but never all.

August rolled out covered 22 vulnerabilities from Microsoft, including four rated a perfect 10 out of 10 in Azure SQL databases, two separate Azure Arc flaws and Azure managed instances for Apache Cassandra, plus seven more critical elevation of privilege bugs spanning from Azure Entry ID and Exchange Online.

Microsoft also quietly patching CVE-2026-69 or 836, which is a remote code execution zero-day in EntraID, but they found and fixed it server-side internally.

No customer action needed on that specific one.

and production environment configurations.

On the backend, we use .NET 10 with boring Azure parts, components like Azure SQL, all that stuff.

But you know, we don't have to maintain it.

So we are super happy about it and let the other people do the hard job and we can just use them.