Run maintenance jobs on Azure SQL

Many users on Azure SQL Server do not realize they have to do their own maintenance on Indexes. This index will slowly become fragmented and the performance will decrease over time. Azure SQL does not have a Job scheduler (agent) like on premise. In this post I’ll describe how to schedule a maintenance job from an ASP.NET Core application.

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Increase timeout Migrations Entity Framework Core

Sometimes a migration takes more time then your default timeout of your database connection. In such a case you do want to increase the timeout for the migration to be able to complete, but you do not want to change the timeout for your normal operations.

Add Index with Include Entity Framework Core

When creating indexes with code first migrations in Entity Framework Core you can create an index on a table by adding the following to your DbContext:

protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)
{
    base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder);

    modelBuilder.Entity<table>() 
        .HasIndex(t =&gt; new { t.Column1, t.Column2}); } 

Implement Pessimistic Concurrency in Entity Framework Core

In a scenario where we were using SQL server as a queue, before publishing events to external queues, we wanted the data to be processed only once and in order, even with multiple processors for failover. When reading from the table we wanted to lock the records and block other processors from reading those records, while being processed. This is called Pessimistic Concurrency, unfortunately Entity Framework Core does not support this out of the box. To realize Pessimistic Concurrency you need to write your own SQL queries directly on the database (The solution is database type bound, in this case Microsoft SQL server). This blog post will show how it can be accomplished.