(SQL) Tip of the Day: Using D Series Azure VMs with SQL Server

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Today’s (SQL) Tip…

If you haven’t seen them yet the D series Azure VMs have a non-persistent SSD drive attached to the VM. These SSDs can handle near 50,000 IOPS and can really ramp up the performance of your SQL database. The problem of course is they are non-persistent disks, to utilize the speed up from these VMs you can do a few different things.

  1. If you are running SQL Server 2014 you can use Buffer Pool Extensions. If you put the extension file on the SSD you can get a huge speed boost for reading on your DB.
  2. Especially if you are a heavy TempDB user you can place your TempDB files on the SSD and gain some large performance gains.