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Automatic performance monitoring in Azure SQL Data Warehouse (preview)

By Matt Usher, Principal Program Manager, Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Azure SQL Data Warehouse now supports Query Store for monitoring and managing your performance data.

Monitoring and managing the performance of your data warehouse is critical to the overall health of your data estate. With the increase in data and query velocities, tracking query metrics pertaining to usage frequency, resource consumption, or regressions can impact your ability to efficiently draw meaningful insights from your data.

To increase your efficiency, we’re excited to reveal the preview of Query Store for Azure SQL Data Warehouse for both our Gen1 and Gen2 offers. Query Store is designed to help you with query performance troubleshooting by tracking queries, query plans, runtime statistics, and query history to help you monitor the activity and performance of your data warehouse. Query Store is a set of internal stores and Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) that allow you to:

  • Identify and tune top resource consuming queries.
  • Identify and improve ad hoc workloads.
  • Evaluate query performance and impact to the plan by changes in statistics, indexes, or system size (DWU setting).
  • See full query text for all queries executed.

The Query Store contains three actual stores: a plan store for persisting the execution plan information, a runtime stats store for persisting the execution statistics information, and a wait stats store for persisting wait stats information. These stores are managed automatically by SQL Data Warehouse and provide an unlimited number of queries storied over the last 7 days at no additional charge.

Enabling Query Store

Enabling Query Store is as simple as running an ALTER DATABASE T-SQL statement:

ALTER DATABASE [Database Name] SET QUERY_STORE = ON;

Note: You can disable Query Store by running the ALTER DATABASE command specifying OFF.

Finding the full text for any query

With Query Store, you can retrieve the full text of any query executed over the last 7 days by using the sys.query_store_query and sys.query_store_query_text DMVs.

SELECT
 q.query_id
 , t.query_sql_text
FROM
 sys.query_store_query q
 JOIN sys.query_store_query_text t ON q.query_text_id = t.query_text_id;

The results show the query_id and the text of the query being executed.

query_text

Finding your top executing queries

When enabled, Query Store tracks all query executions. On a busy data warehouse, you may want to look at the top queries by execution count. Using the Query Store views, we can get the query execution count for the 10 commands executed most frequently.

SELECT TOP 10
      q.query_id                    [query_id]
      , t.query_sql_text            [command]
      , SUM(rs.count_executions)    [execution_count]
FROM
      sys.query_store_query q
      JOIN sys.query_store_query_text t ON q.query_text_id = t.query_text_id
      JOIN sys.query_store_plan p ON p.query_id = q.query_id
      JOIN sys.query_store_runtime_stats rs ON rs.plan_id = p.plan_id
GROUP BY
      q.query_id
      , t.query_sql_text
ORDER BY
      3 DESC;

Results

Finding the execution times for a query

Query Store also gathers runtime query statistics for you to help you focus on queries with high variance in execution. Using the sys.query_store_plan and sys.query_store_runtime_stats DMVs, we can gather:

SELECT
      q.query_id               [query_id]
      , t.query_sql_text       [command]
      , rs.avg_duration        [avg_duration]
      , rs.min_duration        [min_duration]
      , rs.max_duration        [max_duration]
 FROM
      sys.query_store_query q
      JOIN sys.query_store_query_text t ON q.query_text_id = t.query_text_id
      JOIN sys.query_store_plan p ON p.query_id = q.query_id
      JOIN sys.query_store_runtime_stats rs ON rs.plan_id = p.plan_id
WHERE
      q.query_id = 10
      AND rs.avg_duration > 0;

Results after execution

Finding the queries with the highest variance in execution

WITH RawData AS
(
    SELECT
        q.query_id               [query_id]
        , t.query_sql_text       [command]
        , rs.avg_duration        [avg_duration]
        , rs.min_duration        [min_duration]
        , rs.max_duration        [max_duration]
        , (((rs.max_duration * 1.0)/ (rs.min_duration * 1.0)) - 1) * 100   [variance_pct]
    FROM
        sys.query_store_query q
        JOIN sys.query_store_query_text t ON q.query_text_id = t.query_text_id
        JOIN sys.query_store_plan p ON p.query_id = q.query_id
        JOIN sys.query_store_runtime_stats rs ON rs.plan_id = p.plan_id
    WHERE
        rs.min_duration > 0
)
SELECT
    *
FROM
    RawData
ORDER BY
    variance_pct DESC

Results with the highest variance in execution

Next steps

Query Store is available in all Azure regions with no additional charge. Azure SQL Data Warehouse continues to lead in the areas of security, compliance, privacy, and auditing. For more information, refer to the whitepaper, “Guide to enhancing privacy and addressing GDPR requirements with the Microsoft SQL platform,” on Microsoft Trust Center, or our documentation, “Secure a database in SQL Data Warehouse.”