I have some code running merge statements on a table and the inserts are running about 4x as slowly as the updates. I suspect this is due to the Azure SQL database needing to repeatedly grow the database size.
The auto-growth size in my Azure SQL database is very small, 16 MB. Is there any way to increase this or set it to a percentage? I couldn't find anything useful and the normal ALTER DATABASE commands didn't work. I've checked a bunch of different SKU tiers and all seem to report 16MB. Bumping up from Standard to Premium has improved the speed a bit, but not up to the level of the updates.
Any suggestions?
Here's a sample of its growth during a data import:
