Tip Of The Day: SQL Server The Importance Getting Storage Account Solution Right for SQL IaaS. Why optimizing storage performance is so important for SQL Server in a VM? You can easily scale your VMs to maintain the balance between cost efficiency and performance, but storage is more difficult to change once things are running already. We need therefore to get storage account setting right upfront. And thus, we need to ensure that our storage account solution can buffer spikes in our workloads. Picking the wrong storage can lead to complication down the line. Option 1: No Cashing A combination of VMs & storage account SKU will determine the IO size for your solutions. Analysing your application requests based on history, aspiration and/or expectations will ensure you choose the right sizes for your solution. Option 2: Cashing. When you choose a VM with Cashing, IO no longer throttle at the host as the excess is now cashed. Here, the size of your VM is no longer a bottleneck. Pay close attention to storage accounts and VMs SKUs when architecting your solution. Consider memory-optimized or storage-optimized VM sizes for best performance. Determine the appropriate storage configuration and take advantage of Azure Blob storage read caching. Select a balanced VM size & Storage account SKU for your VM solution. Thank you #sql #azuresql #azure #azuredevops #azuredevopsengineer #developercommunity #devopscommunity #solutionsarchitect #solutionarchitect