Azure Serverless Deep Pause vs Light Pause

Question

Hello Azure Community,

I currently have my Azure SQL Serverless database on 15 minutes auto-pause. If the database is inactive for 15 minutes it goes into a light pause, meaning records are fetched in 4-6 seconds instead of the usual 2 seconds on the first fetch after the pause. However, if the database has been on pause for several hours overnight, it appears to go into a deep pause. After this deep pause it takes 1 minute to fetch the records.

I am fine with my Database always having the Light Pause but I would like to avoid the Deep Pause.

1. Is it possible to change the settings so the Database only goes into the Light Pause and never the Deep Pause?
2. If 1 is not possible, how many hours of pause does it take before Azure switches to the Deep Pause? If it's for 4 hours then I can setup a program that will always do a simple Query every 3.75 hours for example.

My objective is to eliminate all Deep Pauses but maintain the Light Pauses.

Thank you

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Answer 1

Hello Axium, unfortunately, Azure SQL Serverless does not provide a direct setting to differentiate between “Light Pause” and “Deep Pause.” The auto-pause feature is designed to pause the database after a specified period of inactivity, and the resume time can vary depending on how long the database has been paused. The auto-pause delay can be configured, but it does not allow for fine-tuning to avoid longer resume times after extended periods of inactivity.

A possible workaround like what you mentioned could help eliminate the deep pause. However, there's no straight forward answer to provide in terms of what the frequency of this program to query the DB should be, since the inactivity time isn't exposed by the serverless SQL.

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Answer 2

Hi Axium •,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

As I understand, you want to eliminate all Deep Pauses but maintain the Light Pauses in Azure SQL Database Serverless.

Serverless is price-performance optimized for single databases with intermittent, unpredictable usage patterns that can afford some delay in compute warm-up after idle usage periods.

The latency to auto-resume and auto-pause a serverless database is generally order of 1 minute to auto-resume and 1-10 minutes after the expiration of the delay period to auto-pause.

We recommend you use Provisioned Compute, with more regular, predictable usage patterns and higher average compute utilization over time.

Let us know if your ask is different to what we understand.

Thanks