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Category: Cloud

Immutable Backups on SQL Server 2025 in Azure

Published 2026-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Warwick Rudd takes us through some steps:

Most people know they need backups. Fewer have thought about what happens when somebody else gets to them first. Ransomware doesn’t start by encrypting your databases. It starts by finding your backups, because once those are gone you have nothing to recover to and every reason to pay. So a backup that anyone with the right credentials can delete is only a partial answer. It protects you from a failed server. It doesn’t protect you from someone who has made their way into your environment.

What you want is a backup that can’t be changed or deleted by anybody until the retention period you set has passed. Not an attacker, not a compromised admin account, and not you on a bad day. SQL Server 2025 makes this a lot more practical. Backup to URL now supports Managed Identity, so you can write backups to immutable Azure Blob Storage without handing out a SAS token or a storage key. There’s no secret sitting in a credential waiting to be found.

Click through for steps to set up the storage account.

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SQL Server on Azure Local Now GA

Published 2026-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Raj Pochiraju announces a product:

Some of the world’s most critical databases run in places where cloud connectivity cannot be assumed. A remote industrial site, for example, may need production systems to continue operating when external connectivity is unavailable. A regulated organization may need sensitive data and processing to remain within sovereign boundaries.

Today, SQL Server on Azure Local is generally available for connected and disconnected operations. With this release, customers can modernize where their data resides while maintaining control over infrastructure, connectivity, and data placement. They can bring AI closer to their data with Foundry Local on Azure Local, currently in preview, and use eligible existing SQL Server licensing investments.

Azure Local is rather limiting in terms of the available hardware, though there are specific environments that I think could be well-suited for this.

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DiskANN Vector Index and Search Now GA

Published 2026-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Pooja Kamath makes an announcement:

Today, we are announcing the general availability of DiskANN Vector Index & Search across Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance with the always-up-to-date update policy, and SQL database in Microsoft Fabric.

DiskANN brings scalable approximate nearest-neighbor search directly to the SQL engine. Developers can store vectors alongside relational data and combine vector similarity with the filters, joins, security policies, and transactional data their applications already rely on.

It does support INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE, and they say there’s asynchronous index maintenance. If that works the way it should, it gets rid of one of the biggest pain points of using DiskANN-based vector indexes in the SQL Server universe today.

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A Quick Primer on Microsoft Entra ID

Published 2026-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Boich gives us a high-level overview:

As a DBA with on-prem and cloud experience, I feel confident in saying that I’m fairly well versed on the “DBA Domain” part of the shared responsibility model. However, if we really want to do our jobs right as data professionals, having an understanding of the entire infrastructure does wonders when it comes to making architectural decisions that can impact the entire system.

The struggle I’ve experienced being a DBA is that hearing things like “Entra ID” or “Microsoft Entra Domain Services” has me sitting in a position where I know of those things because I’ve been around it for years but not really having as deep of an understanding as I’d like to. In this post, I’m going to talk a bit about authorization, and authentication from the cloud perspective, specifically Azure, so that other fellow DBAs and data professionals can gain some insight, see what it looks like to operate in the Entra Admin Portal, and show that it’s not as overwhelming as I thought it would be.

Read on to learn more.

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Managing Resources via Azure Cloud Shell

Published 2026-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Boich isn’t afraid of the command line:

As a DBA or any data professional, it is becoming more valuable and vital to have a well rounded understanding of your data estate and environment. However, sometimes it can be a bit cumbersome, especially when connecting to Azure resources via PowerShell. You have to fumble with authentication, connection cmdlets and more, which can be a bit discouraging to use at times.

There are some interesting and useful tools to help circumvent that overhead and manage your Azure resources. Azure Cloud Shell is a great quick tool to use if you want to have a lightweight, and easily accessible way to help manage and administer your Azure resources.

Read on to see how you can connect and some of the things you can do with it. You also get your choice of bash versus PowerShell.

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Using the Azure Resiliency Agent

Published 2026-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens gives a copilot a spin:

And that isn’t limited to services like storage, web portals, user management, and data stuff. It’s also location, backups, and disaster recovery. But there’s a catch: you need to make sure this is configured. I always compare the cloud (Azure in my daily work) with a huge box of Lego. You have all the pieces and elements to make something cool, but you have to build it. Even when you automate it, you still need to think about what you want.

Now, before I continue my Azure Fundamentals training, let’s move on to what this post is about: resiliency. Or, how your environment is set up for disaster recovery.

Let’s use the Azure Copilot to guide the process, create the necessary resource and review the advice.

Click through to see how it works. Because it’s in preview right now, we don’t know how much it will cost later. But in the meantime, you can give it a try.

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Contrasting LTAP and HTAP

Published 2026-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew notes another convergence of OLTP and OLAP:

At the Data and AI Summit in June this year, Databricks introduced Lake Transactional/Analytical Processing, or LTAP. My first reaction, I’ll admit, was cynicism, just for a change. Every software vendor must invent new names for old things these days. And for those of us who have worked in data architecture long enough to have the grey hair to prove it, like me, this felt very familiar. Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing, or HTAP, a term Gartner coined back in 2014, has long advertised bringing operational transactions and analytics “closer together”. In my experience it never really became a strong implementation pattern in data platform deliveries.

Read on to learn how LTAP and HTAP differ, where Databricks and other competitors (like Microsoft) are going in this space, and how much they have yet to do.

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Shortcuts to Iceberg Tables in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev makes a connection:

Snowflake is an increasingly popular option for data warehousing. One nice Snowflake feature is the ability to configure a table to save its data in Iceberg file format in the Snowflake own managed storage or external storage, including S3, GCS, ADLS Gen 2, and OneLake. As I wrote in the post “Give Me Your Data!”, Fabric supports shortcuts to Iceberg tables, in which case the data is not copied but exposed as a Parquet Delta table in a Fabric lakehouse. This could be useful when building Fabric-centric solutions on top of Snowflake without moving the data.

Iceberg isn’t just a Snowflake thing, though this is certainly helpful if you do have both Snowflake and Fabric.

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Azure Databricks and Power BI Storage Modes

Published 2026-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb makes a choice:

In case you haven’t already seen the blog post on the Power BI blog or the discussion on LinkedIn, we at Microsoft published a new white paper last week to help you decide which storage mode to use when you’re using Power BI to create semantic models and reports on data stored in Azure Databricks. You can find the announcement and the link to the paper here.

Click through for Chris’s thoughts and check out the whitepaper.

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