In Chapters 8 and 9 we explored how to diagnose and troubleshoot performance challenges at the platform and the query level, respectively. This chapter will focus on how to configure the Azure platform itself to improve performance. Some of these concepts we first explored in Part 1 (Chapters 2 – 4 ) along with some basic Azure SQL concepts. Here we will focus on maximizing performance, emphasizing features that are exclusive to Azure SQL or were first developed and introduced in Azure SQL.