Ok, I’m no counting last week as a ‘Year of Azure’ post. I could,but I feel it was even too much of a softball for me to bare. Unfortunately, I was even less productive this week in getting a new post out. I started a new client and the first weeks, especially when travelling are horrible for me doing anything except going back to the hotel and sleeping.
However, I have spent time the last few week working over a most difficult question. The challenges of SQL Azure throttling behaviors and error reporting.
Reference Materials
Now, on the surface SQL Azure is a perfect wonderful relational database solution. However, when you begin subjecting it to a significant load, its limitations start becoming apparent. And when this happens, you’ll find you get back various error codes that you have to decode.
Now, I could dive into an hours long discussion regarding architectural approaches for creating scalable SQL Azure data stores. A discussion mind you which would be completely enjoyable, very thought provoking, and for which I’m less well equipped then many folks (databases just aren’t my key focus, I leave those to better…. er…. more interested people *grin*). For a nice video on this, be sure to check out the TechEd 2011 video on the subject
Anyways…
Deciphering the code
So if you read the link on error codes, you’ll find that there’s several steps that need to be decoded. Fortunately for me. While I have been fairly busy, I have access to a resource that wasn’t. One fairly brilliant Andrew Espenes. Now Andrew was kind enough to take on a task for me and look at deciphering the code. And in a show of skill that demonstrates to me I’m becoming far older then I would like to believe,
Anyways, pulled together some code that I wanted to share. Some code that leverages a technique I haven’t used since my college days of developing basic assembly (BAL) code. Yes, I am that old.
So lets fast forward down the extensive link I gave you earlier to the “Decoding Reason Codes” section. And our first stop will actually be adjust the reason code into something usable. The MSDN article says to apply modulo 4 to the reason code:
Next determine the resource type (data space, CPU, Worker Threads, etc…):
And finally, we’ll want to know the throttling type (hard vs. soft):
adjustedResourceCode = adjustedResourceCode >> 4;
adjustedResourceCode = adjustedResourceCode | resourceCode;
resourceCode = adjustedResourceCode & 0xFFFF;
ResourcesThrottled = (ResourceThrottled)resourceCode;
Next Time
Now I warned you that I was short on time, and while I have some items I’m working on for future updates I do want to spend some time this weekend with family. So I need to hold some of this until next week when I’ll post a class Andrew created for using these values and some samples for leveraging them.
Until next time!
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