Cloud – Page 144 – Curated SQL

Query Tuning In CosmosDB

Published 2019-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran explains how we can tune queries in CosmosDB:

This is most common question in my talks about Cosmos DB from DBAs. Cosmos DB is a managed database, this does not mean that you cannot tune up your queries. But the way you tune up the queries is nothing like SQL Server.

First you need to be sure that you configured your Cosmos DB containers right. What do I mean with that? You should pick the right partition key before you start to tune up any of your queries. Tuning up your queries is not going to help you in long run if you selected a wrong partition key when you created Cosmos DB containers. Throughput value is another value you need to worry about, the good news about the throughput is, you can change it if you need to. You cannot change your partition key!

It’s a whole different world over there.

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Using AzCopy To Sync Data

Published 2019-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West is pleased with an update to AzCopy:

As of November 2018 however, the v10 preview of AzCopy is vastly improved. Firstly, it runs cross-platform on Windows, Linux and macOS (it is open-source, and appears to be written in Go). Secondly, it has more sensible command-line switches. Thirdly, and most importantly in my mind, it includes the much-awaited sync option. This has been a long time coming.

Click through for a demonstration of this synchronization option.

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Choosing Azure Data Lake Analytics Versus Azure Databricks

Published 2019-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant helps us make the decision between using Azure Data Lake Analytics and Azure Databricks:

Databricks is a recent addition to Azure that is greatly influencing the technology choices that people are making when determining how to process data. Prior to the introduction of Databricks to Azure in March of 2018, if you had a lot of unstructured data which was stored in HDFS clusters, and wanted to analyze it in a scalable fashion, the choice was Data Lake and using USQL with Data Lake Analytics. With the introduction of Databricks, there is now a choice for analysis between Data Lake Analytics and Databricks for analyzing data.

Click through for the comparison.

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The State Of Database Scoped Configurations

Published 2019-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer takes us through the current state of Database Scoped Configurations in SQL Server:

I have already blogged about the first version of the Database Scoped Configurations for SQL Server 2016, with 4 visible optionsplus the procedure cache cleaning option, but we have followed in SQL Server 2017 with 5 (listed) & 9 (in practice – DISABLE_INTERLEAVED_EXECUTION_TVF, DISABLE_BATCH_MODE_ADAPTIVE_JOINS, BATCH_MODE_MEMORY_GRANT_FEEDBACK, BATCH_MODE_ADAPTIVE_JOINS are visible and functioning), and in just another year we have received a huge upgrade to the currently available 21 for SQL Server 2019.

It seems like this is a common route the SQL Server teams are going down, and it makes sense: your settings for Mega-DB probably shouldn’t be the same as for the tiny database in the corner. Oh, and that whole Azure SQL Database thing.

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Creating An Azure Storage Account

Published 2019-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse walks us through setting up an Azure Storage Account through the Azure Portal:

Azure offers a lot of features that enable IT professionals to really enhance their environment. One feature that I really like about Azure is storage accounts. Since disk is relatively cheap, this continues to hold true in the cloud. For less than $100 per month, you could get up to 5TB of storage including redundancy to another Azure region.

Read on to learn how to set up one of these.

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Switching Azure Portal Accounts

Published 2018-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse is happy with a change to the Azure Portal:

This means that I could have multiple email accounts that I have to use in order to sign into the portal. Using a password manager such as 1Password, not usually a big deal and more of an annoyance rather than a headache.
Within the past month or so, Microsoft has updated the portal to allow me to easily switch accounts. Previously you had to log out of the portal and then log back in.

This is quite convenient. Prior to this change, switching to a different account could goof with other sites I had open (like if I was sending an Outlook e-mail through one account, switching the Azure Portal signed-in account would log me out from Outlook). It’s still not a perfect experience but it’s a lot better.

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Tips On Running SQL Server In RDS

Published 2018-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen shares some tips on running SQL Server in Amazon RDS:

Or you can go with Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). This is more of a managed service where Amazon looks after some aspects of your database server for you. In return you give up some of the control you would have with your own server or VM. You can still pick the version of SQL Server you want installed, usually down to which cumulative update you want – though note that RDS normally lags behind the latest box version of SQL by 3 months or so. RDS is what’s known as a PaaS offering (Platform as a Service).
So, what do you give up and what do you gain? Here’s a quick summary of a few things I’ve noticed. This is not intended to be comprehensive and please bear in mind that AWS is a fast-moving beast – changes happen regularly.

There are some good tips here, so check them out.

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Using Databricks Delta In Lieu Of Lambda Architecture

Published 2018-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Mendes contrasts the Lambda architecture with the Databricks Delta architecture and gives us a quick example of using Databricks Delta:

The major problem of the Lambda architecture is that we have to build two separate pipelines, which can be very complex, and, ultimately, difficult to combine the processing of batch and real-time data, however, it is now possible to overcome such limitation if we have the possibility to change our approach.
Databricks Delta delivers a powerful transactional storage layer by harnessing the power of Apache Spark and Databricks File System (DBFS). It is a single data management tool that combines the scale of a data lake, the reliability and performance of a data warehouse, and the low latency of streaming in a single system. The core abstraction of Databricks Delta is an optimized Spark table that stores data as parquet files in DBFS and maintains a transaction log that tracks changes to the table.

It’s an interesting contrast and I recommend reading the whole thing.

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Integrating PowerApps With Power BI

Published 2018-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Wolfgang Strasser continues a series on the PowerPlatform with a post showing how to integrate an existing PowerApp with Power BI:

When creating a new PowerApp using the Power BI integration, you get an additional data source – PowerBIIntegration that serves as the connection to the Power BI report. Whenever a filtering action occurs in the Power BI report, this information is available in this property.
During the PowerApps creation action I selected the action to add a new form which in the next step needs to get a connection to the Article table (which holds the additional article details).

Check out the entire series too.

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Working With Files In Azure Cloud Shell

Published 2018-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates shows us how to export a Power BI report to Azure using Azure Cloud Shell:

Cloud Shell is a lightweight way to run scripts using either Bash or PowerShell. You can run scripts in a browser using the Azure portal or shell.azure.com, with the Azure mobile app, or using the VS Code Azure Account extension. If you have seen the “Try it now” links in Azure documentation pages, that will direct you to use Cloud Shell.
The rest of this post focuses on using PowerShell with Cloud Shell.

Click through for the demo.

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Category: Cloud