This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We are pleased to announce the availability of Azure SQL Database tips, an open-source project to help Azure SQL Database customers improve their database design, configuration, and operations.


 


The project is on GitHub at https://aka.ms/sqldbtips. You can download a T-SQL script and execute it in your Azure SQL DB database at any time. In about a minute or less, the script will output a set of tips aimed at improving your database design, gaining better workload performance via configuration tweaks, and highlighting potential issues that may be impacting database performance and health.


 


If this sounds useful, head over to the project wiki page to see a detailed description and usage instructions, and make sure to check out the FAQ page.


 


In our engagements with Azure SQL Database customers, we often see a common set of problems and improvement opportunities, particularly among customers new to Azure SQL Database, or new to the MSSQL database engine. Showing these problems and opportunities in an easy-to-understand and actionable way, and providing the relevant technical background is the main goal of this project.


 


As of this writing, the script checks for over 40 conditions to produce tips. We continue to improve the script using customer feedback and suggestions, and add new tips based on our customer engagements. Reach out to us with your comments, new tip ideas, and other suggestions by opening issues in the GitHub repo, or via comments on this blog post.


 


In the short time since this script has been available, several customers used it to get relevant (and sometimes surprising!) tips to improve performance and reduce resource utilization, in some cases letting them scale down the database and reduce costs. We hope that you can give it a try soon, and find out how you can improve your databases in Azure SQL DB.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.