A SQL Azure tip a day (6) – Running out of space

In SQL Azure you have to define the max size of your database and you pay for that size. When you reach that limit, your database will set to read only and connections trying to modify the data will be terminated. You now have two options, increase the max size of the database or delete something, indexes or data. The easy part is to increase the size like you would do with an ordinary database, but in SQL Azure you have a simplified syntax for that, because you don’t need to worry about files and filegroups etc. ALTER DATABASE SQLServiceTools MODIFY(MAXSIZE=5GB) As with any database, you are limited by the resources, and in SQL Azure you are limited to a max size of 150Gb (Business edition). If you need more, you have to use a second database and sharding or federation. That is another blog post that will be posted later. If you are used to have lots of space in your SAN and can expand your database beyond the SQL Azure limit, you may feel a little bit uncomfortable, but if you are running out of you SAN capacity, it’s probably cheeper to activate federation in SQL Azure.