A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Olivier Van Steenlandt troubleshoots an issue:
When setting up database mirroring from Azure SQL to Microsoft Fabric for one of my demo databases, I ran into an issue while trying to connect to my Azure SQL database.
As you can see in the screenshot above, it seems that a setting on my logical SQL Server in Azure is misconfigured. Let’s resolve that in a couple of steps.
Click through for the screenshot, the specific error, and how Olivier was able to get things working.
Leave a CommentRebecca Lewis shares a tale of woe:
Cloud-based SQL Server security isn’t simpler. It’s different — and the learning curve is brutal if you grew up on-prem.
If you’ve spent years working Windows authentication, SQL logins, role memberships, and the occasional certificate, you may assume cloud security is more of that, just with a portal. Not. The SQL Server/Cloud permission models are layered differently, the terminology shifts depending on the platform, and the people who ‘own’ security are spread across teams that don’t always speak the same language.
Read on for an example of the kinds of challenges you can run into. Adding to that complexities around managed identities and authorization mechanisms and things can get very convoluted, even when the intent is to simplify matters.
1 CommentThomas Rushton troubleshoots a billing issue:
So you signed up for a three year deal to keep costs down and more predictable. But while Reservations can make Azure spend more predictable, they can’t make it completely static. You’ll be OK if you’re paying in USD, but if your organisation is billed in any other currency, you’ll be subject to the vagaries of exchange rates when buying any Azure service.
Read on for a specific instance in which UK customers experienced a fairly significant price change based on the timing of changes in currency exchange rates.
Leave a CommentAaron Merrill announces a new preview offering:
Microsoft Fabric continues to expand the OneLake security surface with new granular REST API support for role management, giving developers and platform teams far more control over how security policies are created, retrieved, and managed programmatically. In addition to the existing batch role API, Fabric now offers discrete Create, Get, and Delete role APIs, making it easier to build incremental, automation-friendly security workflows that align with modern DevOps and governance practices.
Click through for a quick explanation of how things did work and how they will work going forward.
Leave a CommentAleksey Vitsko doesn’t want public database access:
You have an Azure Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN configured and can successfully connect to your virtual network over VPN. Your SQL resources – such as Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, or SQL Virtual Machine – are hosted within the virtual network. Your goal is to eliminate the use of public endpoints and rely solely on private connectivity.
Click through to see how.
Leave a CommentPooja Chhabra tries a few things:
If you’ve worked with large-scale machine learning pipelines, you must know one of the most frustrating bottlenecks isn’t always found in the complexity of the model or the elegance of the architecture — it’s writing the output efficiently.
Recently, I found myself navigating a complex data engineering hurdle where I needed to write a massive Pandas sparse DataFrame — the high-dimensional output of a CountVectorizer — directly to Amazon S3. By massive, I mean tens of gigabytes of feature data stored in a memory-efficient sparse format that needed to be materialized as a raw CSV file. This legacy requirement existed because our downstream machine learning model was specifically built to ingest only that format, leaving us with a significant I/O challenge that threatened to derail our entire processing timeline.
Read on for two major constraints, a variety of false starts, and what eventually worked.
Leave a CommentJohn Deardurff looks for an alternative:
With the retirement of the Data Migration Assistant (DMA) on July 16, 2025, and the retirement of Azure Data Studio in February 2026, what tools do we use to assess and migrate databases to Azure SQL? The new SSMS 22 Hybrid & Migration Component only has options for On-Premises migration.
Read on to see what’s currently available.
Leave a CommentJohn Morehouse cranks that slider to the right:
If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to boost memory or I/O, you had to scale the whole instance, paying for extra CPU you might not need—and hoping the upgrade fixed the bottleneck.
It worked but wasn’t elegant and could be slow or awkward. Scaling sometimes took hours when time was of the essence.
The Next-Gen Azure SQL Managed Instance marks a major shift from the old model. It was way overdue.
The downside is that there’s still a per-CPU hard cap on IOPS and it’s low. Granted, it’s only about two orders of magnitude lower than what I’d expect from a decent on-premises solution, but that’s still enough to limit severely my ability to recommend SQL Managed Instance to anybody.
Leave a CommentAnasheh Boisvert puts on the green eyeshade:
In this blog post, we’ll walk through Eventstream’s pricing model to give you a clear understanding of how it works and help you navigate it with confidence.
By the end of this post, you will be able to:
- Comprehend how Eventstream pricing is structured across its components.
- Understand the relationship between Eventstream components and billing meters.
- Review detailed pricing examples to support precise and confident cost estimation.
Read on for a breakdown of the components and several examples.
Leave a CommentAleksey Vitsko wants access to private endpoints:
You have resources in Azure (including, but not limited to, Azure SQL), and you have a task at hand to eradicate usage of public endpoints. Security requirements are to start communicating with resources, such as database servers through encrypted VPN channels.
This is the “people in my office will use this” VPN, whereas Azure also has a Point-to-Point VPN for individuals and remote workers.
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