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Day: July 26, 2022

Choosing Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions

Sarah Dutkiewicz compares and contrasts:

Every time I do an Azure DevOps talk, I get someone asking me about migrating from GitHub to Azure DevOps. Every time, I have to ask “Why do you want to migrate from GitHub to Azure DevOps?” Why would you choose between Azure DevOps and GitHub? Or better yet – do you have to choose between them? Let’s look at how they compare and the tooling available.

This is a really tough question and Sarah helps explain why.

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KQL Extract

Robert Cain continues a series on KQL:

Almost all languages have the ability to extract part of a string. In C#, this is the Substring method of a string. With SQL, it is the SUBSTRING command.

Kusto has an operator that will perform this same task, it is called extract. In this post we’ll see some examples of using it.

Click through to see how extract works.

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Cross-Subscription Key Vault Access

Andrew Coughlin sets up secure Key Vault access:

Let’s first discuss the setup of what we will be discussing in this blog post.  I will have two subscriptions assigned to the same Azure AD Tenant.   Within each Azure subscription I will have a resource group in each.  I will create the Azure Key Vault in one subscription / resource group and then I will create a virtual machine in the other subscription / resource group.  This is just for example purposes; I could utilize other azure services that can use managed identities.   I could also create a service principal for my application to use to get keys or secrets.

In this example we would be using private endpoints.  Are you looking for how to do this with public endpoints?  Check out my recent post on how to do that here .

When in doubt, private endpoints are the right choice. They’re probably the right choice when not in doubt as well.

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Starting a Data Mesh Project

Paul Andrew continues a series on data mesh:

A common question I get asked a lot when creating a data mesh architecture is where to start? The consultant in me defaults the answer to ‘it depends’, of course 

However, in this blog post I want to give a better answer based on my experience of working with various customers so far. As always, the usual caveats apply, I’m happy to go first when trying to define a starting point for our data mesh delivery and fully accept that parts of this are probably wrong. This is also founded in the knowledge that every customer I’ve worked with is different, with different priorities and very subjective views on why they even need a data mesh architecture. Not to mention various levels of data platform maturity.

Paul also includes some nice roadmap and architectural box-drawing diagrams, so check those out.

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Finding Logged Errors in SSISDB

Thomas Williams checks the logs:

Due to its simplicity, I’m a fan of the default, in-built “SSIS log provider for SQL Server” logging, which writes to the SSIS database SSISDB when the package is deployed to a SQL Server. This logging comes out of the box with very little setup required, and can be supplemented by custom messages – for instance, using Dts.Log in a script task as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/integration-services/extending-packages-scripting/task/logging-in-the-script-task.

Best of all, because log messages are written to tables in the SSISDB database, end-users can run a query or report to troubleshoot errors.

Read on for a query which pulls the last seven days worth of error information from the built-in log.

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Azure VM Auto-Shutdown

Dennes Torres saves some cash:

The Auto-Shutdown policy is another important policy to ensure our virtual machines don’t expend more than what we planned for them. If we have a time window to use the virtual machines, the auto-shutdown policy can deactivate them at the right time.

We need to discover the deep internal details about the auto-shutdown configuration before creating the policy. The method we can use is to set this configuration and export the virtual machine as a template. We change the configuration to on and off, export and check the difference.

This can be kind of annoying when you’re working late—though you can delay auto-shutdown pretty easily. If you’re the type of person to forget turning off cloud resources when not in use, this is one way to prevent an unexpectedly large bill.

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Reducing GAM Contention with tempdb in SQL Server 2022

David Pless explains a performance benefit:

Over the past several SQL Server releases, Microsoft has improved the concurrency and performance of the tempdb database. In SQL Server 2022 we are addressing one of the last areas of contention by introducing concurrent global allocation map (GAM) and shared global allocation map (SGAM) updates which will give SQL Server 2022 a big improvement for scalability as tempdb is arguably the most important database in your environment.

Click through for the details. I can see this being a big performance improvement on really busy environments which make heavy use of temp tables.

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