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Month: April 2022

Using the Azure Synapse Analyzer Report

Published 2022-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Sanjay Raut introduces an interesting report:

The Azure Synapse Analyzer Report was created to help you identify common issues that may be present in your database that can lead to performance issues. This report focuses on known best practices that Microsoft has identified with SQL Dedicated Pools. Following these best practices will help to get the best performance out of your solution.

One thing I appreciate about this is that it covers many items which people don’t know to think about when moving over from SQL Server or Azure SQL Database.

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Thinking Azure Data Platform Security Architecture

Published 2022-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Craig Porteous begins a new series:

Reference architectures are great! You’ve got all of the key components in there, nice and clear. Colourful lines showing how data moves through each stage, product, or service. Great for a slide deck or a proposal to get rid of that old creaking data warehouse and into a shiny new Data Lakehouse.

Not so great for the finer details demanded by security operations teams however.

This promises to be an interesting series.

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Restarting Azure Data Factory Triggers

Published 2022-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard provides an after-action report:

During delivery of the class, I popped over to a much older data factory and fired up a couple integration runtimes (IRs). You see, on this older data factory, I trigger a couple pipelines that check to see if I’ve left an IR running. If so, each pipeline will shut down its respective IR. The trigger fires each evening. I blogged about the pipeline design almost two years ago in a post titled  Stop an Azure-SSIS Files Integration Runtime (Safely).

Read on for the full report, some takeaways on how to limit the risk, and possible next steps if you find yourself in a situation like Andy did.

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Walking through the Azure Log Analytics User Interface

Published 2022-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain starts a new series on KQL:

The area in the upper half is where you enter the query you want to run. The lower half is where the results are displayed. We’ll see an example of this in action later in this post.

Just above the query area is a toolbar. The Run button will execute the query you’ve entered. Note too, you can use the keyboard command SHIFT+ENTER to run a query. I’m a keyboard guy, so this is what I use most often to run queries, which you’ll see if you take either of my KQL courses on Pluralsight (I’ve linked to them in the Conclusion of this post).

Read on for a walkthrough of the product. Robert also mentions his Pluralsight course, which I thoroughly enjoyed and used as research materials for a talk I put together.

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Connecting Kafka Cross-Network

Published 2022-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Praful Khandelwal sets up a hybrid Kafka cluster:

In this article, we will be talking about a simple set-up involving local machine (macOS) and Azure VM. We’ll discuss the step-by-step procedure to produce events from local machine to Kafka broker hosted on Azure VM and also to consume those events back in local machine. While this does not cover the exact scenario described above, it gives a fair idea about how the Kafka messages can be exchanged across the network.

Kafka is pretty chatty, so I’d hope to have really good network connectivity, such as a Direct Connect (for AWS) or Express Route (Azure) in place.

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The Basics of Azure Storage Explorer

Published 2022-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Manvendra Singh takes us through Azure Storage Explorer:

This article will explain Azure storage explorer, its installations, and details of how to start working with this application to access Azure storage services. Azure storage provides a flexible solution to store various types of data at a massive scale in the cloud environment. If you have many storage accounts in Azure storage, then it will be difficult to manage them. Microsoft has recognized this problem and developed a desktop application Azure storage explorer to manage Azure storage accounts easily. It can be installed on Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems.

This is a rather useful tool.

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Merging ADX Queries in Power BI

Published 2022-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter joins two Azure Data Explorer tables using Power Query:

The merge operation (Table.NestedJoin) is the M language equivalent to creating relationships between tables in the model.

The resulting ADX operation is join.

You can join ADX tables by writing KQL, by using relationships or by merging queries in Power Query.

In this article I’ll show how to use merge in a way that produces efficient KQL queries without the need to write any KQL syntax.

Click through for the process.

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Finding the Latest in the Powershell Gallery

Published 2022-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks does some marketing:

It is easy to search the PowerShell Gallery online and from a PowerShell prompt. But I felt there could be more. To address this “marketing” need, I’ve started PSGallery Report.

This is not a PowerShell module. I have set up a process to generate daily reports on what has recently been published in the PowerShell Gallery. I’m generating a set of reports in markdown and posting them to Github.

This is an interesting idea, though you might need to browse to yesterday’s version of the code (if you’re reading this today, 2022-04-11) because the latest run appears to have removed everything.

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KEEP PLAN: A Not-So-Useful Query Hint

Published 2022-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Zika digs into a query hint:

Like Dwarves of Moria, I delved too greedily and too deep. I found the answer in a Plan Caching and Recompilation in SQL Server 2012 whitepaper before trying it out on my own. Relevant excerpt:

KEEP PLAN

The KEEP PLAN query hint changes the recompilation thresholds for temporary tables, and makes them identical to those for permanent tables. Therefore, if changes to temporary tables are causing many recompilations, this query hint can be used.

But since it doesn’t show the proof, I decided to test it out anyway.

And it’s a good thing, too, as it turns out this isn’t quite how things work anymore.

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