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Category: Administration

The Importance of Monitoring in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-10-25 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld flips a switch but also watches it:

A long time ago, I blogged about Power BI governance with topics like feature implementation in a phased approach and why you should consider to disable export to Excel. In this blog, I want to continue the governance topic with another blog about why monitoring your tenant is important! This blog will also provide you an overview of the various monitoring options you have out of the box, no matter what your role is. No matter if you are the workspace-, capacity-, domain- or tenant administrator.

I encourage everyone, no matter if you are the service administrator or not, to go through this blog and look from various angles how monitoring can help. I think it can be relevant for any Fabric / Power BI user to see all capabilities it has to offer from a different angle and better understand possible restrictions that are set by your service administrator.

Read on for Marc’s argument, as well as plenty of examples of what you can do as far as monitoring goes.

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Fixing Timeout Issues with Azure SQL Database

Published 2024-10-25 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens shares some knowledge:

The customer can connect to the Azure Sql database with Sql Server Management Studio (SSMS) but not with a specific client application.
When digging into the logs (all logs were activated for this database), nothing shows up for the specific login used by the client application. The application itself returns a connection error caused by a time-out.

The application resides outside of Azure and can’t use a VPN connection, the Azure Sql Server has a specific firewall rule to allow incoming traffic from this specific IP address. Not a situation I’m really happy with, but it happens.

Read on for the solution. It was not one I had anticipated. But it did land in my “When in doubt, blame the network” policy.

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Comparing Snowflake vs SQL Server E-Mail Configuration

Published 2024-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie sends two e-mails:

Today, I want to talk about all the effort that goes into setting up the ability to email in SQL Server and Snowflake.

First is our old friend – SQL Server. I’ll leave this one to the experts at Microsoft. As has been the case over the last few years, they have some great documentation at Learn.Microsoft.com – especially when it comes to SQL Server.

I don’t know anything about sending e-mails via Snowflake (other than what Kevin mentions here), though I imagine a lot of the difference in complexity is that SQL Server allows arbitrary SMTP selection and requires an existing SMTP server.

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Configuring Database Mail in Azure SQL MI

Published 2024-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword sends an e-mail:

SQL Agent jobs allow us to schedule and automate tasks on a SQL Server instance. Crucially, when things go wrong we need to know about them. That’s why we use notifications.

Setting up Operators and job Notifications is as expected on a Managed Instance. However, when it comes to sending the notifications we may have a challenge, as shown in the SQL Agent Error Logs:

Read on for the solution.

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Building an Impact Analysis Process

Published 2024-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld needs more than the minimum impact analysis:

Imagine you have a semantic model in the Power BI Service (or Fabric if you will), and you’re about to make a breaking change to this semantic model. How do you inform your end users? How do you tell them about this change? In this blog I will zoom in to options you have in the interface that will help you to reach out to your users, looking at different aspects from other reports in Power BI, but also more complex the users that connect via Analyze in Excel.

Click through for the use case, why the built-in impact analysis option for Power BI isn’t sufficient, and what you can do to flesh it out.

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Migrating to Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server from Single Server

Published 2024-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush performs a migration:

Why Migrate to Flexible Server?

  • High availability and disaster recovery: Flexible Server provides higher availability with zone-redundant architecture.
  • Customizable maintenance windows: More control over when updates and maintenance tasks occur.
  • Performance improvements: Fine-tuned scaling and performance adjustments without downtime.
  • Enhanced security: With VNet integration and more advanced networking options.

Read on to learn more about by when you have to migrate and how you can perform the migration.

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Converting Audit Files to CSV via Read-SqlXEvent

Published 2024-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Keisler finds a work-around:

Reading the contents of an audit event file can be accomplished using either Management Studio or the T-SQL function, sys.fn_get_audit_file. However, sometimes a customer may want to use a third-party tool to read and aggregate audit records, and some of those tools do not have the ability to read the binary audit file. In that case, the customer will just use sys.fn_get_audit_file to write the audit records to a database and then use the third-party tool to ingest those records from the database.

What if that third-party tool cannot even read from SQL Server? That happened to me recently where the only option was to read from a text-based file.

Read on for Patrick’s solution to the problem and a real pain point you’ll find along the way.

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Capturing Database Object Changes in SQL Server

Published 2024-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Sebastiao Pereira creates a trigger:

Data Definition Language (DDL) is a group of SQL statements that can be executed to manage database objects. The idea is to create a database trigger that tracks and logs all changes to database schemas, including modifications to stored procedures, tables, views, and other schema objects and storing any event in one table.

Read on for an example of a database-level trigger. These are much less likely to cause performance problems compared to table-level triggers, though you could certainly cause issues via poor trigger definition.

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Querying Audit Log (.xel) Files in Azure SQL DB

Published 2024-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Tanayankar Chakraborty reads an audit log:

A recent issue was brought to our attention that customers could not query .xel log files in an Azure SQL DB using t-sql command. The customers complained that when they ran the command, they received column headers but no content whereas they know that there is content in the logs because they were able to open them with SSMS using Merge Extended Event Files. Here was the T-sql command used by the customer:

select * from sys.fn_get_audit_file (‘https://mydbastorage.blob.core.windows.net/sqldbauditlogs/servername/dbname/SqlDbAuditing_Audit_NoRetention/*.xel’, NULL, NULL);

Click through for the solution, which came down to two separate issues.

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