Serverless

In the Ultra Transcenders books

AZ-305DP-900DP-800

Each book explains Serverless in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• Archive

  Offline access tier for blobs, cheapest to store yet dearest to access. Reading a blob means rehydrating it first, which can take as long as 15 hours.

• Auditing

  Azure SQL capability that sends database audit logs to Log Analytics, Event Hubs or a storage account; that account is allowed to be in a different region.

• General Purpose

  An Azure SQL service tier that pairs a single compute node with remote storage. Compared with Business Critical it has higher latency and lacks a synchronous replica.

• Hyperscale

  Azure SQL Database tier built for very big databases (as much as 128 TB), offering quick scale operations and read replicas across which load is balanced.

• Business Critical

  Azure SQL vCore tier offering the lowest latency by running Always On replicas on local SSD, plus zone-redundant failover that loses no data; serverless isn't offered.

• Capacity

  A reserved block of compute for a tenant whose size is fixed by its SKU; Fabric F SKUs express it in capacity units (CUs). Workspaces assigned to it unlock features like Copilot, and from F64 upwards people with free licences can view Power BI content.

• APPLY

  Evaluates a table-valued expression for every row on its left, inside FROM. Think of OUTER APPLY as a left outer join and CROSS APPLY as an inner join.

Related terms

• Active geo-replication

  Azure SQL Database feature that replicates a single database to as many as four readable secondaries, failed over manually. SQL Managed Instance does not offer it.

• Advanced Threat Protection

  Part of Defender for SQL that raises alerts for possible SQL injection, code vulnerable to injection, brute-force attacks and access by unusual principals or from unusual locations.

• AI Runtime

  Microsoft Learn steers GPU deep learning towards this rather than Databricks Runtime ML. It provides serverless GPUs, currently in Public Preview, for fine-tuning and bespoke deep learning models.

• AI/BI dashboard

  The current dashboard type in Azure Databricks: AI helps you author it, its data stays governed by Unity Catalog, and publishing adds a companion Genie Agent. The legacy SQL dashboards it replaced can no longer be opened.

• Always Encrypted

  Client-side encryption of SQL columns using keys never revealed to the database engine, meaning cloud administrators and DBAs only ever see ciphertext.

• ANSI

  The American National Standards Institute, which made SQL a standard in 1986, a year before ISO did. Its standard types, for example INT, DECIMAL and VARCHAR, explain why SQL looks much the same from one vendor to another, even though each has its own dialect.

• ANSI mode

  A stricter Spark SQL behaviour, enabled by default since Apache Spark 4.0 (so also in Fabric Runtime 2.0), where a bad cast or an integer overflow fails the query rather than quietly producing null. Functions such as try_cast, try_add and try_divide keep the old null result, while switching ANSI mode off should be treated as a temporary workaround.

• Anti join

  A join ([LEFT] ANTI JOIN in SQL, anti or left_anti in PySpark) returning just the left-hand rows that find no partner on the right, with only the left table's columns. A typical use is spotting fact rows whose dimension key is missing.