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Am very new to Azure SQL - indeed this is the first thing I've set up. I have a thrid party tool writing to the DB WF capturing tickets from our ticketing system that have passed through a particular status 'waiting approval' and writing a handful of fields (TicketNumber, engineer, title) to a tiny one-table DB so I can audit them later.
Because it's a tiny DB and there are no more than one or two tickets a day to write a few fields about, and because I'm only now learning it I think it fits easily within the free usage band. It works when I test it. However it keeps failing randomly elsewhen.
This is the error (names obfuscated)
[Database 'databasename' on server myservername.database.windows.net' is not currently available. Please retry the connection later. If the problem persists, contact customer support, and provide them the session tracing ID of '{44ADAFBA-0DE1-41FC-B2A9-BED7AB3C4480}']"
It "feels" like my free database is just sort of stopping when I'm not actively checking it in Azure but am I wildly off base, or can give me a clue?
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You are correct. When idle, the server is shutdown and part of the serverless cost saving. You should increase the connection timeout. You could schedule a job to hit the server on a periodic basis, but you might use up your compute allotment.
To add to what Bruce says, if you don't want this to happen, you should change the database to a provisioned General Purpose or DTU-based edition. I would recommend the latter for cost reasons. If this is a tiny database as you say, an S0 or S1 is likely to be a cost-efficient choice.
Whatever you do, don't implement a keepalive solution - that is when you make Serverless expensive.
Why isn't it waking up when I query it. Would doing a 'wake up' meaningless query before my actual query help?
It does wake up. But what has happened is that the database has been rolled out to disk and is not attached to any server ("Serverless"). So when it is queried, it has to be rolled in again, and that takes 30-60 seconds.
If you can live with the delay, a better approach than sending a meaningless query is to increase the connection timeout in the connection string to 90 seconds.
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Hi Leia Fee,
We haven’t heard from you on the last response and was just checking back to see if you have a resolution yet. In case if you have any resolution please do share that same with the community as it can be helpful to others. Otherwise, will respond with more details and we will try to help.
Non of the timeout changes helped so I did fgo for a 'pointless' query listing the tables before making my actual add row query. It's working more or less
None of the timeout changes helped so I did go for a 'pointless' query listing the tables before making my actual add row query. That worked.