A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Xu Jiang announces a new preview feature:
We are pleased to announce that Eventstream’s Confluent Cloud for Apache Kafka streaming connector now supports decoding data from Confluent Cloud for Apache Kafka topics that are associated with a data contract in Confluent Schema Registry.
Click through to see how this currently works.
Leave a CommentArun Sirpal explains what zone redundancy is in Azure:
Do you know what happens when you enable zonal redundancy for your SQL managed instance?
Lets define it first (in the context of Business-Critical tier) – zonal redundancy is achieved by placing compute and storage replicas in different availability zones (3) and then using underlying Always On availability group to replicate data changes from the primary instance to standby replicas in other availability zones.
Availability zones are in the same Azure region, so it works well for high availability but isn’t as good for disaster recovery: if an entire region goes down, zone redundancy won’t help you very much. Also, be aware that you’re paying for what’s running in those three zones because TANSTAAFL.
Leave a CommentKenneth Fisher is back in the fight:
I recently had to copy an Azure SQL database (SQL db) from one subscription to an Azure SQL Server instance in another subscription. All of the help I found suggested going to the database and hitting the COPY option. Unfortunately, when I did, I ran into a problem.
Read on for the issue, as well as one way to fix it. The route Kenneth landed on was the same one I ended up going with when I had a similar problem and very limited access to SQL DB on both subscriptions.
Leave a CommentMatthew Hicks makes an announcement:
We’re thrilled to announce an exciting new Preview capability in OneLake: you can now automatically read Delta Lake tables using Apache Iceberg compatible readers, with no need for migration, copying, or manual conversion. This enhancement gives data engineers and analytics teams unprecedented flexibility in how they access and interact with their data.
This is pretty neat, given that Iceberg is the other popular format for data lakes.
Leave a CommentVarun Jain makes a security announcement:
A Fabric workspace identity is an automatically managed service principal that can be associated with a Fabric workspace. Fabric workspaces with a workspace identity can securely read or write to firewall-enabled Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 accounts through trusted workspace access for OneLake shortcuts. Fabric items can use the identity when connecting to resources that support Microsoft Entra authentication. Fabric uses workspace identities to obtain Microsoft Entra tokens without the customer having to manage any credentials.
Previously, a workspace identity was automatically assigned the workspace contributor role and had access to workspace items.
Read on to see what’s changing, why, and what you can do instead.
Leave a CommentKoen Verbeeck wants good requests:
I needed to run a PowerShell cmdlet in an Azure Devops pipeline. The cmdlet in question was New-AzRoleAssignment, but the cmdlet itself isn’t important. What is important is that I needed to pass the object ID of a service principal to the command. Even though I was pretty sure the syntax and everything was correct, I got a “Operation returned an invalid status code ‘BadRequest’” error when the PowerShell was run (inside an Azure PowerShell task):
Read on to see how Koen diagnosed and resolved the issue.
Leave a CommentJon Vöge continues a series on write-back options into Microsoft Fabric:
In that article, we took advantage of some of the built-in sample code from the User Data Function editor, as well as some great code examples from Sujata: Example User data functions for Translytical task flows · GitHub
The problem? All of these samples use SQL Databases in Fabric as the backend item.
Jon switches this from a SQL database into a Fabric Data Warehouse, and notes some of the challenges along the way.
Leave a CommentRayis Imayev streams some data:
In my post last week (https://datanrg.blogspot.com/2025/06/salesforce-cdc-data-integration.html), I talked about Salesforce Change Data Capture (CDC) event data streaming, where the initial event destination was file storage in Azure. But what if we anticipate a higher volume of incoming Salesforce source data or the addition of a new data feed? This could create the need for an alternative method of managing incoming events.
Read on to learn more.
Leave a CommentJosephine Bush tracks some errors:
Logging is a necessity in the database world, well, the entire tech world. You need to know what is happening in and around your databases. It’s easy to setup in Azure SQL DB.
Read on to learn more about the logging options available in Azure SQL DB, as well as how you can configure and view the log and audit results.
Leave a CommentReitse Eskens tries out a tool for monitoring Microsoft Fabric installations:
Let me set the scene quickly for you. You’re working for an organisation where Fabric is in the process of being adopted or it’s already fully in use. Regardless of the number of capacities, workspaces, etc, you’re interested in what’s going on in your Fabric environment. You have questions like “Who is using the reports?”, “Who is changing settings in the Admin panel?” and “How is my capacity being used?”.
Read on for a single tool that can solve these sorts of questions.
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