A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Kendra Little shares a few lessons:
When I think about service objectives, I tend to assume we’re talking about guaranteed uptime, often expressed in some number of 9’s.
But Azure SQL Database has its own language. The best resource I know of to learn that language is the Azure SQL glossary of terms.
Read on for three lessons, two of which are pretty straightforward but the third one is liable to strike without you realizing.
Comments closedEtienne Lopes troubleshoots a strange issue:
After the downsizing (to GeneralPurpose: Standard-series (Gen5), 2 vCores) occasionally there were timeouts in the application for a very specific task (the command timeout property in the application was set to 30 seconds). Other times the very same task would execute immediately, as it should always, since the underlying query was actually quite simple: a SELECT to a single, although large table (58 GB) but with a predicate that would always result in a perfect index seek to return never more than 300 rows. Furthermore each time there were timeouts, there were also momentary I/O spikes up to 100%:
Read on to learn more about what caused this problem and how Etienne was able to resolve it.
Comments closedSabrin Alsahsah migrates a SQL managed instance:
We have recently received a few service requests from our customers to know how to move an Azure SQL-managed instance between subscriptions. In this blog article, we will be discussing supportability, methods, and solutions that can achieve this goal, and you can decide the best for you depending on your business requirements and environment setup.
Currently, at this time there is no direct way to move a managed instance itself, but we can have a workaround by moving the Azure SQL managed databases across Azure SQL managed instances that are hosted\located in different subscriptions.
Click through for three workaround options.
Comments closedArun Sirpal pushes the big red button:
We all would like to save money when operating in the cloud, Microsoft has released a stop / start concept for SQL Managed Instances – preview mode!
At the time of writing, the Managed Instance needs to be built from the November wave where you will see the functionality in the overview section and it has to be in the General purpose tier. If you have managed links or failover groups then you cant use this feature.
There is a kicker, however, which makes this a less-than-pleasant option. Arun has more detail.
Comments closedWarwick Rudd continues a series on Azure Arc-Enabled Data Services. Part 9 covers database restoration:
Now that we have our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance deployed, potentially one of the most common tasks you will need to undertake is being able to perform a database restore of an existing database to your newly provisioned Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.
In our previous post, we deployed our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance – “ae-sqlmi-demo” that we will continue to investigate and learn about how we can utilize in our data environments. In this post, we are having a look at restoring a database.
Part 10 looks at upgrade management:
Comments closedManaging your Data Controller through Azure Data Studio provides an easy approach for controlling when you wish to apply upgrades supplied by Microsoft. This is something you need to stay on top of as the upgrade path is an incremental approach and only allows you to upgrade to the next version. If you leave it too long, you could be faced with multiple upgrades to be undertaken. This could lead to extended outages while you get up to date.
Leila Etaati gets lost in translation:
There is a possibility to call cognitive service for translation inside Power Query.
I will use this to translate 3000 rows of data about people arrested in Iran for protesting; This information contains city Name, Fullname and Other statements.
In this article, I will show how to call cognitive services for translation, create a proper JSON call and finally, use it inside Power Query.
Read on for the translation in Power Query, specifically from Farsi to English.
Comments closedDennes Torres takes us through the proper use of managed identities:
Let’s talk about authentication between Azure Functions and resources used by Azure Functions and conclude with many poorly documented secrets about how to use User Assigned Managed Identity. When we build Azure functions, they usually need to authenticate against other Azure resources: Azure SQL Database, Storage Accounts, Service Bus and many more.
Each of these services have an authentication that we can call “Meh!”: Azure SQL has SQL Standard Logins, storage accounts have SAS tokens, service bus, shared access keys and so on. These are not the safest methods possible. If the key leaks, you will have a security problem because anyone with the key will be able to access the resource.
There are multiple solutions for this problem, some of them would pass through Key Vault, used to store secrets, keys and passwords. But let’s go directly to the best one: Remove the usage of keys at all.
Read on to learn how.
Comments closedVicent-Philippe Lauzon makes an announcement:
We recently made our new Kusto data connection available in public preview: Cosmos DB to Azure Data Explorer Synapse Link.
This does look like a marketing-heavy announcement but the short version is that you can ingest data from Cosmos DB into Data Explorer pools via Synapse Link rather than creating your own ETL process. The previous Cosmos DB connector for Synapse Link tied to a dedicated SQL pool.
Comments closedHugo Calzada Martin recovers from an oopsie:
If we have a Customer-managed TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) and we delete by mistake the entire “Azure Key Vault” or just the “Key” object, the database will be inaccessible:
Read on for Hugo’s response as well as how to recover from this scenario. There are examples of how to do this in the Portal, in Powershell, and the CLI.
Comments closedFor this instance, we will setup an alert and action to determine and send out a notification when a Virtual machine has been stopped and also could be restarted whenever such conditions has met.
1. Firstly, Go to search pane on the Azure portal search monitor, click on alert inside monitor and create an alert rule. Further, specify a scope for what you want to setup alert. On this occasion, I am setting it for virtual machine.
Read on to learn more about what Azure Monitor does, as well as the steps to set up an alert and an action.
Comments closed