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Category: Cloud

Recursive Metadata Discovery in Azure Data Factory

Published 2020-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank gives us one method to perform recursive metadata discovery in Azure Data Factory:

Azure Data Factory’s Get Metadata activity returns metadata properties for a specified dataset. In the case of a blob storage or data lake folder, this can include childItems array – the list of files and folders contained in the required folder. If you want all the files contained at any level of a nested a folder subtree, Get Metadata won’t help you – it doesn’t support recursive tree traversal. In this post I try to build an alternative using just ADF.

But before you get too invested in this technique, please read Richard’s spoiler.

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Public Preview of SQL Server on Azure Arc

Published 2020-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Sasha Nosov gives us an update on Azure Arc:

The preview includes the following features:

– Use Azure Portal to register and track the global inventory of your SQL instances across different hosting infrastructures. You can register an individual SQL instance or register a set of servers at scale using the same auto-generated script.

– Use Azure Security Center to produce a comprehensive report of vulnerabilities in SQL servers and get advanced, real time security alerts for threats to SQL servers and the OS.

– Investigate threats in SQL Servers using Azure Sentinel 

– Periodically check the health of the SQL Server configurations and provide comprehensive reports and remediation recommendations using the power of Azure Log analytics.

Click through for more information and documentation.

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Diving into the Azure Resource Mover

Published 2020-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres shows off what the Azure Resource Mover can do:

If you include the need to copy a resource or set of resources, instead of only moving, the list expands a lot.

Azure already offers the resources to do this: ARM templates, automated deployments, Data Sync, Recovery Services Vault, VM replication and so on. The problem is that sometimes, to move a set of objects together, you may need to use many of these services and understand how to use them.

The solution is a new free service, still in preview, called Azure Resource Mover. This service reduces the complexity of moving resources, minimizing the number of decisions needed on how the resources will be moved. More than that, the last step, deleting the source of the move, is optional, as you will see in detail later. You can use this feature, not only to move resources, but also to copy and distribute them across many regions. During the move process, only one side (source or destination) will be active, but once you finish the move, if you decide not to delete the source, you have in fact a new deployment of the solution.

This is a fairly detailed tutorial, so check it out.

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Moving a Virtual Machine with the Azure Resource Mover

Published 2020-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Kathi Kellenberger tries out the Azure Resource Mover:

Another task I may want to perform is to move a VM to another region. I found this set of steps that involves using Azure Recovery Services Vault that seems a bit complex. Fortunately, I recently heard about a new, much easier way to move VMs and other resources called Azure Resource Mover (in preview). It was announced today.

Read on to see how this works. I like the idea a lot, especially for those times when you accidentally create resources in different regions and only realize it when it’s time to tie everything together.

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Azure Synapse Analytics Sample Datasets and Scripts

Published 2020-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra shows us where to find samples for Azure Synapse Analytics:

Datasets: A bunch of datasets that when added will show up under Data -> Linked -> Azure Blob Storage.  You can then choose an action (via “…” next to any of the containers in the dataset) and choose New SQL script -> Select TOP 100 rows to examine the data as well as choose “New notebook” to load the data into a Spark dataframe.  Any dataset you add is a linked service to files in a blob storage container using SAS authentication.  You can also create an external table in a SQL on-demand pool or SQL provisioned pool to each dataset via an action (via “…” next to “External tables” under the database, then New SQL script -> New external table) and then query it or insert the data into a SQL provisioned database

Click through to learn more, as well as a few other things you can do with Synapse Analytics.

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Azure SQL Managed Instance Updates

Published 2020-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Borko Novakovic gives us a rundown of improvements to Azure SQL Managed Instances:

Azure SQL Managed Instance provide management operations that you can use to automatically deploy new managed instances, update instance properties, and delete instances when no longer needed. Most of the management operations in SQL Managed Instance are long-running but until now it was not possible for customers to get detailed information about operation status and progress in an easy and transparent way.
Through the introduction of a new CRUD API, the SQL Managed Instance resource is now visible from when the create request is submitted. In addition, the new OPERATIONS API adds the ability to monitor management operations, see operation steps, and take dependent actions based on operation progress.
Check out this blog post to learn how to effectively utilize new APIs in real-word scenarios.

If this product potentially fits your needs, also check out Vladimir Ivanovic’s post on performance improvements:

Previously, the tempdb I/O operations were governed as part of the instance log rate cap (which used to be configured to 22 MB/s for General Purpose and 48 MB/s for Business Critical). With this set of improvements, tempdb I/O operations are no longer governed as part of the instance log rate cap, allowing for a significantly higher tempdb I/O rates.

The improved tempdb performance will greatly improve the speed of tempdb-bound operations, such as running queries with large sorts/spills, or data loading through tempdb.

It looks like they’ve upped the caps on several storage-related limits for no extra charge.

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From Kafka Into Azure Data Explorer

Published 2020-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Anagha Khanolkar walks us through a data movement scenario:

Here is an end-to-end, hands-on lab showcasing the connector in action. You can see an overview of the lab below. In our lab example, we’re going to stream the Chicago crimes public dataset to Kafka on Confluent Cloud on Azure using Spark on Azure Databricks. Then, we will use the Kusto connector to stream the data from Kafka to Azure Data Explorer.

There’s also a lab to try this out, though the estimated spend is a bit high.

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Azure Synapse Analytics Query Options

Published 2020-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra has a breakdown of what can query what in Azure Synapse Analytics:

The public preview version of Azure Synapse Analytics has three compute options and four types of storage that it can access (mentioned in my blog at SQL on-demand in Azure Synapse Analytics). This gives twelve possible combinations of querying data. Not all of these combinations currently are supported and some have a few quirks of which I list below.

Read on for a table which breaks down current functionality as well as expected GA functionality.

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The Cost of Verifying Backups to Azure

Published 2020-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Robertshaw reminds us that TANSTAAFL:

Within two weeks of backups being written to Blog Storage, we observed a significant upward trend in cost associated with a Storage Account.  When compared to the previous month, there was an increase of c. £270.  After some further analysis, we were able to associate this increase with “bandwidth” charges.  This didn’t feel right – you don’t pay anything to upload data to Azure (ingress), you only pay when downloading data from Azure (egress).

Using Azure Monitor, we profiled the ingress and egress rates for the affected Storage Account and noticed the following pattern:

Each day, c. 150GB of backups were being written to blob storage (in blue), but shortly after, the same amount was being downloaded (in red).  Over this period, we calculated 4TB of data had been uploaded and then downloaded again.  Based on Microsoft’s latest Bandwidth pricing, whilst the first 5GB of egress per month is free, the next 5GB – 10TB is charged at £0.065 per month.  Some simple maths confirms it to be the additional £270 we observed.

Read on for three possible solutions. My preference for an on-prem solution would be to verify locally and then push to Blob Storage / S3. Backups tend to be faster that way as well, as your disk is likely faster than your network.

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Using an Azure VM’s D Drive for tempdb

Published 2020-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

William Assaf shows how you can use the temporary D drive on an Azure VM to host tempdb in SQL Server:

Moving your SQL Server instance’s TempDB files to the D: volume is recommended for performance, as long as the TempDB files fit it the D: that has been allocated, based on your VM size. 
When the D: is lost due to deallocation, as expected, the subfolder you created for the TempDB files (if applicable) and the NTFS permissions granting SQL Server permission to the folder are no longer present. SQL Server will be unable to create the TempDB files in the subfolder and will not start. Even if you put the TempDB data and log files in the root of D:, after deallocation, that’s still not a solution, as the NTFS permissions to the root of D: won’t exist. In either case, SQL Server will be unable to create the TempDB files and will not start.

Read on for a few options and William’s thoughts on the relative merits of each.

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