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Month: March 2022

Sending E-Mail via Azure Logic Apps

Published 2022-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Maria Zakourdaev replaces Database Mail:

Azure SQL database is a fully managed relational database in the Microsoft cloud. It is a scalable, durable and performant database engine that allows developers to focus on the business logic without worrying about storage or server uptime. The main difference between SQL Server on premises and Azure SQL Database is that in Azure SQL Database only database level features are available. Features, like SQL Server Agent or SQL Server Mail are not supported by Azure SQL Database. However, in some situations we want to send an email from inside stored procedures. This post will show how to solve this challenge.

I’ve found Logic Apps to be surprisingly easy for this kind of thing, including connectors to outside mail services like Gmail. H/T Maria via Madeira Data’s blog.

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So You Want to Migrate a SQL Server

Published 2022-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Biggs has a guide for us:

We are currently performing migrations with upgrade of multiple-instance SQL Servers to new servers. The migrations are going smoothly (knock on wood), and I wanted to relay some information about the migration process. There are four phases you need to perform when migrating a SQL instance to a new server. These phases are Review, Prepare, Test, and Migrate. It sounds simple enough but let’s take a deeper look into what goes into each phase.

Read on for Jon’s take on the migration process.

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Azure Purview Workflows in Public Preview

Published 2022-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Victoria Holt makes note of an improvement to Purview:

Azure Purview Workflows moved to Public Preview 10 March.  This functionality enables customers to orchestrate the create, update and delete operations of data entities, have validation, and approval of these data entities using repeatable business processes.

The benefit of using Purview workflows is higher quality data, policy compliance, user collaboration, and change tracking awareness across the organization.

Read on for more information about how workflows currently work.

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“Production” in Data Analytics

Published 2022-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Joey Jablonski brings up an important point:

Data-driven environments have a fundamentally different set of needs around testing, deployment, and visibility then traditional business applications. Data driven environments need access to fresh data on a high level of update frequency to ensure that data engineers and data scientists are able to effect outputs and recommendations on a timeline that has a positive impact on business decisions and customer experiences.

My day job involves running a predictive analytics team. We train models on production data—there’s very little value in training models on artificial dev data (outside of understanding the parameters of the modeling process), so even our development data generally comes from production. I don’t know that I’m sold on data mesh as a solution to this but it’s worth investigation.

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Coding Style in R

Published 2022-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Maelle Salmon and Chrisophe Dervieux share some guidance on coding style:

Do you indent your code with one tab, two spaces, or eight spaces? Do you feel strongly about the location of the curly brace closing a function definition? Do you have naming preferences? You probably have picked up some habits along the way. In any case, having some sort of consistency in coding style will help those who read the code to understand, fix or enhance it. In this post, we shall share some resources about coding style, useful tools, and some remarks on etiquette.

It is pretty funny how picky we can be about coding style at the margins but ultimately, the primary goal of a coding style should be to give future maintainers as easy a time as possible in troubleshooting the code you write. This makes consistency the most important consideration. After that, there’s a lot of good advice in the post.

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Integrating the Intercom API with Power BI

Published 2022-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria brings in data from Intercom:

I needed to pull some user data for an app that uses Intercom. While I will probably import the data using Data Factory or a function in the long term, I needed to pull some quick data in a refreshable manner to combine with other data already available in Power BI.

I faced two challenges in getting this code to work:

1. Intercom’s API uses cursor-based pagination when retrieving contacts

2. I needed this query to be refreshable in PowerBI.com so I could schedule a daily refresh.

Read on to see how Meagan solved those problems.

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Finding SQL Agent Jobs with Invalid Job Owners

Published 2022-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan is trying to clean up this town:

Do you know which account is the owner for your SQL Server Agent jobs? Some jobs might be owned by user accounts which can become a problem. What happens if that job owner isn’t around forever and goes away? Will that job just keep chugging along?

Without an existing owner, a SQL Server Agent job will not run. Once a user gets disabled or removed from Active Directory, a job is still going to try running under that user but will begin failing.

Click through to see what kind of errors you might find.

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Creating Local Server Groups in SSMS

Published 2022-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Andrea Allred creates a local server group:

In the past, I have talked about CMS (Central Management Servers), but now I don’t have CMS configured and still want to query multiple instances at once. Local Server Groups are my friend.

My preference is CMS, especially as the number of data platform professionals increases. Keeping track of all of those new instances can be a pain otherwise. But if you’re in an environment in which that’s not an option, local server groups provide a reasonable alternative.

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An Overview of Azure Redis Cache

Published 2022-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal lays out the use case of Azure Redis Cache:

Redis Cache is a well know caching technology and you can run it in Azure as a fully managed service. A common requirement (the most basic one) is doing a workflow like:

1. When an application needs to retrieve data, it will first search to see if it exists in Azure Cache for Redis.

2. If the data is found in Azure Cache for Redis (cache hit) use it

3. If the data is not found in Azure Cache for Redis (cache miss), then the application will need to retrieve the data from Azure SQL (or whatever cloud db back end you use)

4. For cache miss scenarios, the requesting application should add the data retrieved from the Azure Database to Azure Cache for Redis.

This is also known as the cache-aside pattern. If you’re feeling really cheeky, you can combine cache-aside with the decorator pattern to “hide” the cache in your code.

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Running SQL Scripts on Snowflake from Azure Data Factory

Published 2022-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck shows off the Script activity in Azure Data Factory:

Azure Data Factory has a new activity introduced this week (around the 10th of March 2022 for you future readers): the Script activity! This is not to be confused with the script task/component of SSIS, which allows you to execute .NET script (C# for most people, or VB if you’re Ben Weissman). No, this task executes SQL, so it’s more akin to the Execute SQL Task of SSIS.

Click through to see how it works while I lament the fact that SSIS never supported the best .NET language.

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