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Category: Cloud

Using Azure Storage Explorer

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal takes us through Azure Storage Explorer:

I only ever use the storage explorer when managing my blobs, files, queues within storage accounts. It is your single view access point for all your storage needs and I totally recommend downloading it and using it (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/features/storage-explorer/).

Why do I like using it? I am sure there are more reasons, but these are personal to me.

Click through for Arun’s reasons as well as installation basics.

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Backup to URL in Azure

Published 2019-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni recommends backing up database to Blob Storage via URL in Azure:

Unlike in your on-premises environment, where you might have up to a 32 Gbps fibre channel connection to your storage array and then a separate 10 Gbps connection to the file share where you write your SQL Server backups, in the cloud you have a single connection to both storage and the rest of the network. That single connection is metered and correlates to the size (and $$$) of your VM. So bandwidth is somewhat sacred, since backups and normal storage traffic go over the same limited tunnel. This doesn’t mean you can’t have good storage performance, it just means you have to think about things. In the case of the customer I mentioned, they were saturating their network pipe, by writing backups to the file system, and then having the Azure backup service backup their VM, they were saturating their pipe and making regular SQL Server I/Os wait.

Read on to see what the alternative is.

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Migrating to SQL Managed Instances with dbatools

Published 2019-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popovic shows how we can perform an offline migration from on-prem/IaaS SQL Server to a SQL Managed Instance using dbatools:

Typically, the offline migration process looks like:

– You need to create an Azure Blob Storage account that will be used to temporary hold the database backups that will be moved from SQL Server to Managed Instance.
– You need to back up the databases to Azure Blob Storage and restore them from Azure Blob Storage to Managed Instance.
– You need to migrate server-level objects such as logins, agent jobs from the source to destination instance.

In this article, I will use Azure PowerShell to create and manage necessary Azure resources, and DBATools PowerShell library to initiate migration.

Read on for the process, including the Powershell scripts and dbatools calls needed.

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AzCopy, Batch Files, and the Task Scheduler

Published 2019-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West shares the results of persistent, relentless experimentation:

This coincidentally has caused an issue if we are using Windows Task Scheduler to schedule the synchronization process, especially if we use a SAS (Shared Access Signature) token which can be quite long. What then happens is we have a command that is longer than Windows Task Scheduler allows, and the task will fail with a very unhelpful error message:

Task Scheduler failed to execute task "\AzureBlobStorageSync". Attempting to restart. Additional Data: Error Value: 2147942487.

Click through to see how Randolph fixed this problem, which created a new problem necessitating Randolph solve it as well.

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Working with Tables in Databricks

Published 2019-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Brad Llewellyn shows us how to build tables (temporary and permanent) and views in Azure Databricks using each of the main languages:

Simply put, an External Table is a table built directly on top of a folder within a data source.  This means that the data is not hidden away in some proprietary SQL format.  Instead, the data is completely accessible to outside systems in its native format.  The main reason for this is that it gives us the ability to create “live” queries on top of text data sources.  Every time a query is executed against the table, the query is run against the live data in the folder.  This means that we don’t have to run ETL jobs to load data into the table.  Instead, all we need to do is put the structured files in the folder and the queries will automatically surface the new data.

Each language has its own way of doing things, but they all use the Hive metastore under the covers.

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Configuring an Azure Databricks Cluster

Published 2019-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Gurgul explains cluster settings in Azure Databricks:

We need compute to run our notebooks and this is achieved by creating a cluster. A cluster is merely a number of Virtual Machines behind the scenes used to form this compute resource. The benefit of Azure Databricks is that compute is only chargeable when on.

Let’s now click the Clusters icon and set up a simple cluster. Once you have loaded the page you can use the “Create Cluster” button.

Click through for an explanation of what each of the settings means.

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Azure SQL DB Serverless

Published 2019-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse takes us through the current public preview of Azure SQL Database Serverless:

Microsoft continues to expand the Azure ecosystem rapidly.  One of the most recent delivered improvements was Azure SQL Database Serverless option.    The new serverless model, which is currently in public preview, provides a compute tier for a single database that scales dynamically with the workload.   This new compute tier is optimal for single database that have unpredictable usage patterns.  Previously, you would provision the compute tier to your Azure SQL Database which allowed to have more granular control on scalability. The serverless tier scaling is effectively controlled by the service itself and will scale when needed.

This looks like it’d be good for a dev server, where the occasional startup cost is fine and there can be significant usage requirement differences based on time—after the devs go home, you’re not likely to need much compute.

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DBCC CHECKDB Error on Azure SQL Database

Published 2019-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal explains an error message on Azure SQL Database:

msg 7928, Level 16, State 1, Line 3
The database snapshot for online checks could not be created. Either the reason is given in a previous error or one of the underlying volumes does not support sparse files or alternate streams. Attempting to get exclusive access to run checks offline.
Msg 8921, Level 16, State 3, Line 3
Check terminated. A failure was detected while collecting facts. Possibly tempdb out of space or a system table is inconsistent. Check previous errors.

Read on to see what this means, as well as what it means for you.

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Azure Dedicated Hosts in Preview

Published 2019-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Mine Tokus covers the benefit of Azure Dedicated Hosts:

Recently introduced, Azure Dedicated Host Preview provides single-tenant physical servers that can host one or more virtual machines. With this new hosting model, physical server is dedicated to your organization and capacity isn’t shared with other customers. Physical server-level isolation helps to address security and compliance requirements, brings visibility and control over the server infrastructure and enables significant cost savings and licensing flexibility for SQL Server workloads on Azure VMs.

I think this might get some recalcitrant large companies to be willing to adopt cloud technologies.

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