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Category: Cloud

C# Notebooks with Cosmos DB

Published 2020-05-26 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran takes us through Jupyter notebooks in Cosmos DB:

Jupyter Notebooks are in everywhere in these days. You can write chunk of code and run it on a web application without worrying about compiler is a great feeling. C# has been little bit late to the party, but we started to see C# Notebooks lately too. Azure Cosmos DB announced their version if C# Notebook this week.
     You can reach all notebook functionalities under the Data Explorer link, There are bunch of sample notebooks you will see under the Notebook link.

There are some limitations here, like needing to use the SQL API, but it’s an interesting approach to data access in Cosmos DB.

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When to Have Multiple Azure Data Factories

Published 2020-05-26 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew explains how to become a factory mogul:

The obvious and easy reason for having multiple Data Factory’s could be that you simply want to separate your business processes. Maybe they all have separate data delivery requirements and it just makes management of data flows easier to handle. For example:

– Sales
– Finance
– HR

They could have different data delivery deadlines, they process on different schedules and don’t share any underlying connections.

You may also have multiple projects underway that mean you want to keep teams isolated.

But that’s not the only reason, so click through to learn several other reasons why you might have multiple Azure Data Factory instances running.

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Data Platform Announcements from Build

Published 2020-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra looks at some announcements from the Build conference:

A few data platform announcements yesterday at Microsoft Build that I wanted to blog about.

The biggest one is Azure Synapse Analytics is now available in public preview! You can immediately log into your Azure portal and use it. While in the Azure portal, search for “Synapse” and you will see “Azure Synapse Analytics (workspaces preview)”. Choose that and then click “Create Synapse workspace” (you first may need to register the resource provider “Microsoft.Synapse” in your subscription – see Azure resource providers and types).

James also covers other highlights, including Cosmos DB and Azure SQL Database Edge.

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Mongo Shell Preview for Azure Cosmos DB

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran takes a look at the preview for a native Mongo shell in Cosmos DB:

Native Mongo Shell became available as In-Preview mode in Azure Cosmos DB on March. I had chance to check it out this week and I decided to write about it this week. Mongo Shell let you execute Mongo database commands in Cosmos DB Data Explorer! Currently, It is not available in all Azure regions. If you don’t see this option, your database might be in a region that does not support this option yet. 
     Click on Data Explorer to see the Mongo Shell button. If you have never used it before, you will need to activate the Mongo Shell by clicking Complete Setup button. This box will open up when you click on Open Mongo Shell.

It sounds like it’s a little bit limited at the moment, but Hasan takes you through the things you can do today.

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Azure Synapse Analytics in Preview

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Simon Whiteley clarifies a Build announcement:

Today’s the day! There’s much buzz & excitement as we FINALLY get to see Azure Synapse Analytics in public preview, ready for us all to get our hands on it. There’s a raft of other announcements that come hand & hand with it too.

What’s that? You thought Azure Synapse Analytics was already available? You’ve been using all year and don’t see what the fuss is about??

I’m expecting this to be the common reaction. The marketing story for Synapse has been… interesting… to say the least. I’ve been asked several times in the last week exactly what the new story is and, given today’s news, I thought I’d clarify.

The big picture is the version of Azure Synapse Analytics I’ve been interested in for a bit, so it’s nice to see the movement here.

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Microsoft Azure SQL Edge Now in Public Preview

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Asad Khan announces the public preview of Azure SQL Database Edge:

Optimized for IoT gateways and devices, Azure SQL Edge extends the industry-leading performance and security of Microsoft SQL engine to the intelligent edge. This small but mighty database engine (<500 MB startup memory footprint) is backed by the same engine that powers Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL and combines all the goodness of the SQL Engine with all new IoT-specific capabilities such as:

– data streaming and time series
– in-database machine learning and graph capabilities
– run on any ARM64- and x64-based devices (*Linux only during preview phase)
– deploy connected, semi-connected or completely disconnected environments

This has the makings of a really good product.

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Accessing Azure from an Android Device

Published 2020-05-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher had a dream:

The other day I had a random thought.

I wonder if there is a version of Azure Portal for Android.

Turns out there is!

This looks most useful for quick observations of machines and services, such as after receiving an alert. But as Kenneth points out, hooking a phone up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse (which, at least on newer Samsung models, is definitely an option) means that you can hit that cloud shell and do most of what you need.

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Taking the Pulse of Your Azure VM

Published 2020-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Broadbent has put together a quick Powershell script to figure out what’s going on with an Azure VM:

I was recently given the task of identifying the state of an Azure VM so that an automation script using the az vm run-command invoke would not fail if the VM was down or under a reboot.

I initially thought the task would be really easy and a simple query of the VM state using Get-AzVM would provide us with a running state property of the VM, but as it happens the state is a little abstracted.

Click through to see how Mark solved the challenge.

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Monitoring Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Pools with Power BI

Published 2020-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Brett Powell has a pair of Power BI templates for monitoring Azure Synapse Analytics:

Upon clicking ‘Load’ you’ll either need to provide your credentials for this source (if you don’t have this data source saved from previous use) or the queries will execute and the following report pages will be available:

– Executions
– Waits
– Sessions
– Waits Detail
– Execution Detail
– Memory
– ExecutionDrillThrough (hidden)

Click through to see what the templates look like and how to obtain them.

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Using Postman with Power BI’s REST API

Published 2020-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld takes us through the Power BI REST API:

Postman is a valuable tool to work with APIs, especially when testing and making ad hoc requests outside of an automated production solution. In terms of where a Power BI developer may find Postman useful, it sits somewhere between the documentation’s “Try It” functionality and a more production-worthy solution incorporating tools like Azure DevOps, Logic Apps/Power Automate, a Power BI custom connector, etc.

The ideas in this post extend an original post from Carl de Souza. Carl shows how to obtain an OAuth2 access token but does so with hardcoded values. Additional API requests use the token from the original response, but he also manually provides this token to those subsequent API calls.

David has a clever technique for getting the bearer token, so check it out.

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