A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Deepthi Goguri enumerates the ways:
Data needs to be protected no matter where it lives, On-prem or in Azure. Data can be protected by using the encryption that Azure provides. What are the types of encryption we have in Azure?
In addition to specific encryption options, Deepthi also provides an overview of Dynamic Data masking and Ledger tables.
Comments closedMichael Bourgon shares some thoughts on Azure SQL Database Auditing:
A couple of notes when using Azure SQL DB Auditing
1) this is actually kinda cool, overall. I plan on mining this in the future for code changes, etc.
2) You can filter it! predicateexpression is the term you’re looking for, available via the powershell module
Read on for more thoughts on the topic.
Comments closedBhaskar Kakaraparthy does a logging switcharoo:
This article is an extension to an existing article to migrate data from Elastic Search to Azure Data Explorer (ADX) using Logstash pipeline as a step-step-step guide. In this article, we will explore the process involved in migrating data from one source (ELK) to another (ADX) and discuss some of the best practices and tools available to make the process as smooth as possible.
Using Logstash for data migration from Elasticsearch to Azure Data Explorer (ADX) was a smooth and efficient process. With the help of ADX output plugin & Logstash, I was able to migrate approximately 30TBs of data in a timely manner. The configuration was straightforward, and the data transfer with ADX output plugin was quick and reliable. Overall, the experience of using ADX output plugin with Logstash for data migration was positive and I would definitely use it again for similar projects in the future.
Read on to see how.
Comments closedDarryl Taft provides an overview of a now generally available service:
Moreover, Azure Load Testing collects detailed resource metrics to help you identify performance bottlenecks across your Azure application components. You can automate regression testing by running load tests as part of your CI/CD workflow.
Azure Load Testing also creates monitoring data using the Azure Monitor service, including application insights and container insights, to capture details from the Azure services.
It’s available in 11 regions, including the best region of all (East US) and the second-best region of all (East US 2).
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck waxes about managed identities:
This however presented me with the opportunity to review what users were actually necessary in the ETL. Turns out, not that many. In many cases, one Azure resource (for example, an Logic App) can use a managed identity to access another Azure resource (such as an Azure SQL DB). For those of you not familiar with the concept, a managed identity is basically a service principal in Azure AD with the same name as your resource. If your Azure Data Factory instance is called myADF, you’ll have an entry in AAD with the name myADF (it’s very much alike the SQL Server service account used on-premises). You can then assign role permissions to this managed identity.
Read on to see how you can use these managed identities to grant permissions without having to set (or reset or store) passwords.
Comments closedDenny Cherry notes that the DNS server is in another castle:
If you have an Azure environment when you have your DNS servers in a separate vNet from your new AKS environment you’ll notice that you get an error when deploying the AKS environment which looks something like this.Agents are unable to resolve Kubernetes API server name. It’s likely custom DNS server is not correctly configured, please see https://aka.ms/aks/private-cluster#hub-and-spoke-with-custom-dns for more information.
The fix for this is actually pretty straightforward, but I’m going to give you a little background on why this happens.
Click through for the answer.
Comments closedAbhishek Narain has an announcement:
Today, we are introducing support for orchestrating Synapse notebooks and Synapse spark job definitions (SJD) natively from Azure Data Factory pipelines. It immensely helps customers who have invested in ADF and Synapse Spark without requiring to switch to Synapse Pipelines for orchestrating Synapse Notebooks and SJD.
NOTE: Synapse notebook and SJD activities were only available in Synapse Pipelines previously.
If you’re familiar with Synapse Pipelines, the equivalent ADF operations are extremely similar, as you’d probably expect.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck doesn’t want people running amok:
Typically you have a bunch of pipelines that are started by one or more triggers. Sometimes, a pipeline needs to be manually triggered. For example, when the finance department is closing the fiscal year, they probably want to run the ETL pipeline a couple of times on-demand, to make sure their latest changes are reflected in the reports. Since you don’t want them to contact you every time to start a pipeline, it might be an idea to give them permission to start the pipeline themselves.
This can obviously be done by tools such as Azure Logic Apps or a Power App, but in my case the users also wanted to view the progress of the pipeline (did something crash? Why is it taking so long? etc.) and developing a Power App with all those features seemed a bit cumbersome to me. Instead, we gave them permission on ADF itself so they can start the pipelines. There’s one problem though, there’s only one role for ADF in Azure, and it’s the contributor role. A bit too much permission, as anyone with that role can change anything in ADF. You don’t want that.
So what can you do? Click through to find out.
Comments closedManan Goel lists what’s been going on with Amazon Redshift:
In 2021, we launched Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2, which is a free web-based tool for data analysts, data scientists, and developers to explore, analyze, and collaborate on data in Amazon Redshift data warehouses and data lakes. In 2022, Query Editor V2 got additional enhancements such as notebook support for improved collaboration to author, organize, and annotate queries; user access through identity provider (IdP) credentials for single sign-on; and the ability to run multiple queries concurrently to improve developer productivity.
Read on for the rest of the highlights.
Comments closedKellyn Pot’vin-Gorman has a new tool for us:
This invaluable framework provides clear guidance on the recommended practices to assess, architect and migrate Oracle workloads to the Azure cloud. This should be the first place for answers to success for Oracle on Azure!
A special thanks to my teammate, Jessica Haessler for working so hard to help me get this to the finish line, as I would have never been able to get this done on my own!
Click through for a link to the guide. There isn’t a Well-Architected Framework assessment for this yet but the WAF articles themselves have quite a bit of detail to them.
Comments closed