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Month: July 2022

Data Architecture Questions to Ask

Published 2022-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra does some thinking:

As an example, if I were asked what product to use to store data in the Azure cloud, I could come up with at least a dozen options, so I need to ask questions to reduce the choices to the best use case for the customers situation. This will avoid what I have seen many times – a company chooses a particular product and after their solution is built, they say the product is “terrible”, but they were using it for a use case that it was not designed for. But the customer was not aware of a better product for their use case because “they don’t know what they don’t know”. That is why you should work with an architect expert as one of your first order of business: the technology decisions at this early part of building a solution are vital to get correct, as finding out 6-months or one year later that you made the wrong choice and have to start over can lead to so much wasted time and money (and I have seen some shocking waste).

Read on for a slew of questions.

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Migrating SSRS between SQL Server Instances

Published 2022-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley performs a migration:

Good evening. Today’s episode is coming to you from my home office, where I feel motivated to write a blog in the comfort of my home.

Today we will discuss migrating SSRS from one instance of SQL Server to another. Several methods are available for you, but I will show you how to backup and restore the Reporting Services components for a full migration.

Read on for the process and pay special attention to Garry’s notes about encryption key handling.

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Creating a Snowflake Instance

Published 2022-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal sets up Snowflake:

Now let’s start the process of creating a snowflake account in the Azure Cloud. You can sign up for a free trial from here – https://signup.snowflake.com/ I am going to bypass this and go straight to the setup screens. (This is slightly different because as an org-admin I have the power to create accounts)

Select the cloud provider and edition you require; we have already discussed these options before. You know me, its going to be Azure but feel free to dive into AWS or GCP.

Read on for some step-by-step installation instructions.

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Choosing Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

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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