For this month’s t-sql Tuesday our host Bjoern Peters (b/t) wants us to describe our experiences with Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance. Well, unfortunately, although I am very excited about it, I don’t have access to Azure SQL Managed Instance yet. So that leaves Azure SQL Database, and as it happens, my company has started working with it some, in fact we’ve just been doing some training on it today and tomorrow.

There are a number of major differences between Azure SQL DB and a regular SQL Server instance. Heck, in Azure SQL DB you can’t even use a USE statement. However, the biggest thing I’ve run into in my company is the need to change our processes.

We have creating a new SQL Server instance down pat. We know what questions to ask, we have forms to fill out, a new server is quickly created, a new instance installed, it’s added to our list of supported instances (depending of course), a new wiki page is added with information on billing, ownership etc, and a script is run that grants us permissions to work with it. Azure SQL DBs, on the other hand, tend to catch us by surprise. A whole new team is creating them and of course, their processes aren’t as mature yet. I mean how could they be? We keep getting surprised by requests for databases we’ve never heard of, we don’t have security for and have no information about the customer or anything else about it.

Now, I’ll guarantee this will correct itself over time, we just need to get better processes in place for the Azure DB creation. Part of that is going to be collecting information on what information we need, and that will just take time.

But here’s my thought for this post. When changing to something new, moving to the cloud, for example, it’s important to think about how your processes might need to be changed and/or expanded. Then you try out the new processes, then review them again. Then try again, review again, over and over. It’s really a never-ending process, but eventually, your processes become stable. I.e. they are good enough that the changes required are rare and/or small.