Microsoft have made the claim that you don’t need to run consistency checks on Azure SQL Databases because they take care of it.  That’s nice, one less thing to worry about right?  Of course to a DBA a claim like that falls into the same category as your backups being reliable without verifying them, or…I dunno…internet privacy not being a problem for people with nothing to hide.  In short, unless I know HOW they are achieving this I am not going to consider my data safe, and even then I’m probably going to be dubious.

So it’s refreshing to see the blog post yesterday from Peter Carlin which outlines the lengths that Microsoft is going to in order to make sure Azure Database users are not affected by data corruption issues.  Check it out here:  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/data-integrity-in-azure-sql-database/

The bit I particularly like is listed under evolving methodologies.  It says “The Azure SQL Database engineering team regularly reviews and continues to enhance the data integrity issue detection capabilities of the software and hardware used in the service.” which is a nice acknowledgement that even with all the proactive work they are doing in this space, data corruption is a case of something going wrong, and there is always room for improving the method of dealing with it.

Thanks Microsoft.