Data Warehouse Support

Posts coming from the team that supports the on premise (APS & PDW) and Azure Data Warehouse offerings

Login Problems with my Azure Active Directory Account to Azure SQL Data Warehouse

From time to time, we on the Azure SQL Data Warehouse (ADW) support team get cases where a customer...

Author: Allan.Miller Date: 08/10/2018

How to create user-defined restore points on Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Microsoft announced user-defined restore point on Azure SQL Data Warehouse. This feature enables you...

Author: Joon Kyu Lee Date: 06/29/2018

Azure SQL DW Performance: CTAS/Partition Switching VS UPDATE/DELETE

DML operations can be resource intensive and harmful to CCI indexes in Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 06/18/2018

Azure SQL Data Warehouse SQL Operations Studio Extension Available

In may the engineering team for Azure SQL Data Warehouse announced integration with SQL Operations...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 06/07/2018

APS AU7 Performance Enhancements

Appliance Update 7 (AU7) for Microsoft's Analytic Platform System (APS) brings with it a couple of...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 05/30/2018

SET IMPLICIT_TRANSACTIONS Behavior On Azure SQL Data Warehouse and APS

Working with transactions in Azure SQL Data Warehouse (ADW) and the Analytics Platform System (APS,...

Author: ScottEpperly Date: 02/20/2018

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Having worked with many customers doing ARM deployments, I've found it is not always clear how to...

Author: Allan.Miller Date: 02/14/2018

Performance: Evaluate Data Skew

This topic applies to both Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Analytic Platform System Data skew occurs...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 01/19/2018

How To: Move your Azure Data Warehouse to a new region and/or subscription

This post applies to Azure SQL Data Warehouse The functionality currently does not exist to move...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 12/14/2017

Performance: Investigate Inconsistent Query Execution Times

This post applies to both APS and Azure SQL DW There is a reasonable expectation that if a query is...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 06/22/2017

APS Monitoring solutions

APS features an out of the box monitoring portal which allows users to review APS components health...

Author: Thomas Bragaloni (MSFT) Date: 05/17/2017

APS / PDW Best Practices: Linked Server: OpenQuery VS EXEC

Many users utilize Linked Server functionality in order to issue queries to PDW using SSMS.  This is...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 07/06/2016

PDW Useful Queries: Check for existence of user temporary tables

User temporary tables in PDW/APS are treated slightly different than temporary tables in SQL...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 06/22/2016

PDW Execution Plans: Why are you shuffling my data?!

One of the objectives when architecting a database on a PDW system is to do so with the goal of...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 06/21/2016

Creating an Active Directory Trust With APS

It is my assumption that almost all companies with an APS will want to connect it to their Active...

Author: Allan.Miller Date: 03/29/2016

Locking Behaviour with PDW Backups

You may notice your daily ETL jobs or queries running slower than usual or in a queued state when a...

Author: Claudio Da Silva [MSFT] Date: 02/16/2016

Loading performance – DWLoader, distribution keys and source files

There are several ways to load data in PDW: SSIS, DWLoader client, and with the latest release BCP...

Author: Thomas Bragaloni (MSFT) Date: 01/20/2016

Deciphering APS / PDW Execution Plans

PDW introduces an additional level of execution plans. These are commonly referred to as 'explain...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 01/12/2016

APS / PDW DMVs Explained

In this post we are going to discuss different types of DMV's in PDW and where the data comes from....

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 10/21/2015

APS/PDW Query Performance: Lock Status

A common scenario customers report is queries which ran quickly yesterday, are taking longer today....

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 09/30/2015

APS AU4 Feature Review: Introducing Round Robin Distribution

This is our second post covering the new features and improvements included in the SQL APS PDW AU4...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 08/07/2015

APS AU4 Feature Review: 1.5x data return rate improvement

The Microsoft engineering team has officially signed off on the latest APS update, Appliance Update...

Author: Tim Salch (MSFT) Date: 08/04/2015