Azure - Know Your Limits

We all have personal capacities and limits that allow us to do something that we want to do every day and most times we know what our limits are. So, you’re thinking, what does that have to do with or how does it apply to Azure? Azure has the same principal behind it, as Azure has limits and capacities just as we do.

On a recent engagement, we ran into an interesting obstacle we needed to overcome. We were migrating from an on-premises ADS environment and wanted to take the SQL Data Warehouses and move them to Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

When we started to ‘peel back that onion’ we found there were certain things we needed to do. First, we needed to understand that there were no cross-database queries with Azure SQL Data Warehouse. This is not about the technology, per se, but about knowing our capacities and resources.

Secondly, we ran into a scenario in which we hit the capacity of 10,000 tables. This client had 10,000 tables with their on premise SQL Data Warehouse, as they had used the appliance to its fullest capacity.

So, here’s why I wanted to share this story. Understanding the capacities of Azure and the Azure resources available to us is important. Are we going to memorize the capacities of all these resources? Of course not, unless you have that photographic memory capacity.

For those like me without that capacity, understanding where to find that info and when we need to look it up is important. If you use your search engine of choice to search ‘Azure capacity limits’, you’ll find a Microsoft doc called Azure Subscription Limits and Quotas.

Something I appreciate about Microsoft is the amount of documentation they’ve put together. Here you’ll find a list of service-specific limits for all services Azure provides and some of the resource limits within them.

When I click on SQL Data Warehouse limits, for example, it takes me to another link and I can click further to find SQL Data Warehouse capacity limits. So, with a few clicks you can drill in and easily determine what limits and capacities your Azure resources can provide.

At times we may not know our own personal limits, but now you know there’s an easy way to find our capacities and limits within our Azure subscriptions. If you’d like to learn more about any Azure product, service or resource, you’re in the right place. Click the link below or contact us—we’re here to help.