Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Cloud

Introducing Azure Notebooks

Published 2018-04-30 by Kevin Feasel

Zach Stagers has an introductory post to Azure Notebooks:

No installation, no maintenance

As with any PaaS solution, Azure Notebooks makes it far quicker and easier to get up and running, as there’s no download or installation required. Microsoft handles all the maintenance for you too!

I’m working on a fairly big project using Azure Notebooks.  It’s very helpful getting 1GB of space, so I can include all of my data, images, etc. from a fairly large number of notebooks.  The big downside is that the server running these notebooks is pretty slow—even for a fairly simple ARIMA model, I had it sitting there for 10 minutes at 100% CPU.  So don’t expect to run a heavy workload against it.

Comments closed

Azure Data Lake Alerting

Published 2018-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Lara shows how to send alerts if you hit a utilization threshold:

If you want to see the step-by-step guide to create a new Log Analytics alert, check out our recent blog post on creating Log Analytics Alerts.

For the alert signal logic, use the following values:

  • Use the query from the previous step

  • Set the sum of AUs to 50 as the threshold (you can use any number that reflects your own threshold)

  • Set the trigger to 0: whenever the threshold is breached

  • Set the period and frequency for 24 hours.

Read the whole thing if you use Azure Data Lake Analytics; an unexpectedly large bill is a tough thing to swallow.

Comments closed

Running The Azure DTU Calculator On An Older Server

Published 2018-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jim Donahoe shows us how to get the Azure DTU calculator running on an older server without Powershell:

I recently had to do an analysis of a client’s database workload using the Azure DTU Calculator(DTU Calculator) and thought it might be interesting to share just how I did that.  I have run this tool numerous times on other clients via the PowerShell method and the Command Line method, however this client’s environment was: Windows Server 2008R2, and SQL Server 2008R2 SP3 and had to be done differently.

Now, from the DTU Calculator page itself, it tells you how the process works.  It essentially runs a perfmon trace for an hour with the following counters:

  • Processor – % Processor Time
  • Logical Disk – Disk Reads/sec
  • Logical Disk – Disk Writes/sec
  • Database – Log Bytes Flushed/sec

My client did not have PowerShell accessible for me to use unfortunately.  I normally prefer the PowerShell script, however in this case I had to use the Command Line Interface, they both return the same results.

Click through to see how Jim did it.

Comments closed

Copying Azure SQL Databases

Published 2018-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal noticed a problem when he tried to copy an Azure SQL Database:

Now, I was looking at the following code.

CREATE DATABASE CodeDBP1 AS COPY OF CodeDB ( SERVICE_OBJECTIVE = 'P1' ) ;

You would think this is okay? I did, especially with the fact that it parsed and was executing. I was thinking a copy of the CodeDB database will be created as a premium P1 database regardless of what the source database service tier was. This  source database is 0.5GB in size under the basic tier and 40 minutes later the copy was still executing. It just didn’t seem right.

Click through for the solution.  If this is going to be normal behavior, I’d really like to see an error message.

Comments closed

Async Processing With Azure Analysis Services

Published 2018-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev notes that you can process Azure Analysis Services cubes without maintaining an HTTP connection:

AAS supports processing tasks asynchronously with REST APIs. The difference is that the service component (REST API) maintains the connectivity to the server – thus reducing the chances of HTTP disconnections from the external application. Microsoft has provided a RestAPISample console app to help you get started. As with any REST API invocation, you’d need to register the app in the Azure Portal so that you can authenticate successfully. Other than that, it’s simple to invoke the REST API and Microsoft has provided step-by-step instructions.

Another, although synchronous, option is to run a PowerShell script in the Azure Cloud Shell environment. You can upload the script as a file. The script can ask you to provide credentials interactively (Get-Credentials method) or you can hardcode the credentials. Here is an example of a PowerShell script that processes a specific table.

Click through to check out how to do this.

Comments closed

Azure Data Factory v2 And Decompression

Published 2018-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Jarvis notes a file naming bug with Azure Data Factory v2 when decompressing files:

ADF V2 natively supports decompression of files as documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/supported-file-formats-and-compression-codecs#compression-support. With this functionality ADF should change the extension of the file when it is decompressed so 1234_567.csv.gz would become 1234_567.csv however, I’ve noticed that this doesn’t happen in all cases.

In our particular case the file names and extensions of the source files are all uppercase and when ADF uploads them it doesn’t alter the file extension e.g. if I upload 1234_567.CSV.GZ I get 1234_567.CSV.GZ in blob storage rather than 1234_567.CSV.

Click through for more details and be sure to vote on his Azure Feedback bug if this affects you.

Comments closed

Creating Azure VMs Using Powershell: Laying The Groundwork

Published 2018-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain has part one of a two-part series on creating VMs in Azure using Powershell:

Creating a virtual machine is great, but it won’t be of much use unless it can communicate outside of itself. That’s where virtual networking comes in. To setup a virtual network, often abbreviated vnet, you need to accomplish three things. First is the creation of the virtual network itself. After the network is created, you need to define a security group for it. In essence, the security group defines a firewall. In the process of creating it, the PSAzure module automatically creates firewall rules that allow HTTP and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) traffic through the firewall. There are functions in PSAzure to create security groups at a lower level, allowing one to create alternate rules. This example will demonstrate the most common options.

The final step is to create a virtual NIC, or Network Interface Card. The NIC will form the bridge between the virtual network and the virtual machine, much like a physical network card allows a physical computer to connect to a real network. First off, a few variables are assigned. These will hold names for the security group, network and subnet names. The network addresses for the main network and subnet are also placed into into variables. Finally, a name is assigned to the NIC.

Check it out, especially if you build a lot of VMs in Azure.

Comments closed

Jupyter Notebooks In Azure

Published 2018-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones looks at using Jupyter Notebooks in Azure:

There’s a new feature in Azure, and I stumbled on it when someone posted a link on Twitter. Apologies, I can’t remember who, but I did click on the Azure Notebooks link and was intrigued. I’ve gotten Jupyter notebooks running on my local laptop, but these are often just on one machine. Having a place to share a notebook in the cloud is cool.

Once I clicked on the link, I found these are both R and Python notebooks, as well as F#. These allow you to essentially build a page of code and share it. It’s kind of like a REPL, kind of like a story. It’s a neat way of working through a problem. I clicked the Get Started link to get going and was prompted for a User ID.

I’m a major fan of using notebooks for validating results as well as training people.

Comments closed

Uploading Data Sets To Azure ML From R

Published 2018-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati continues her series on the Azure ML R package by showing how to upload a data set:

There is a function in AzureML package name “workspace” that creates a reference to an AzureML Studio workspace by getting the authentication token and workspace id as below:

to work with other AzureML packages you need to pass this object to them.

for instance for exploring the all experiments in Azure ML there is a function name “experiments” that gets the “ws” object as input to connect the desire azure ml environment and also a filter.

Click through for  more.

Comments closed

Cloud Savings And TCO

Published 2018-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra argues that moving to the cloud can be a net savings on cost:

I often tell clients that if you have your own on-premise data center, you are in the air conditioning business.  Wouldn’t you rather focus all your efforts on analyzing data?  You could also try to “save money” by doing your own accounting, but wouldn’t it make more sense to off-load that to an accounting company?  Why not also off-load the  costly, up-front investment of hardware, software, and other infrastructure, and the costs of maintaining, updating, and securing an on-premises system?

And when dealing with my favorite topic, data warehousing, a conventional on-premise data warehouse can cost millions of dollars in the following: licensing fees, hardware, and services; the time and expertise required to set up, manage, deploy, and tune the warehouse; and the costs to secure and back up the data.  All items that a cloud solution eliminates or greatly minimizes.

When estimating hardware costs for a data warehouse, consider the costs of servers, additional storage devices, firewalls, networking switches, data center space to house the hardware, a high-speed network (with redundancy) to access the data, and the power and redundant power supplies needed to keep the system up and running.  If your warehouse is mission critical then you need to also add the costs to configure a disaster recovery site, effectively doubling the cost.

I don’t think this story plays quite as well.  For small and mid-sized companies, yes, the cloud is often a net savings.  For companies whose products were designed to be cloud-first and take advantage of burstiness and spot markets, yes, you can drive cost savings that way.  But for most mid-to-large companies, I think the calculus shifts to where sometimes cloud options work better but often they don’t.  Need a few hundred SQL Server instances with microsecond-level latency running SQL Server Enterprise Edition 24/7?  That’s not going to be cheaper.

Comments closed