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Category: Cloud

Fixing Timeout Issues with Azure SQL Database

Published 2024-10-25 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens shares some knowledge:

The customer can connect to the Azure Sql database with Sql Server Management Studio (SSMS) but not with a specific client application.
When digging into the logs (all logs were activated for this database), nothing shows up for the specific login used by the client application. The application itself returns a connection error caused by a time-out.

The application resides outside of Azure and can’t use a VPN connection, the Azure Sql Server has a specific firewall rule to allow incoming traffic from this specific IP address. Not a situation I’m really happy with, but it happens.

Read on for the solution. It was not one I had anticipated. But it did land in my “When in doubt, blame the network” policy.

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Dynamically Start a Collection of Child Pipelines in Fabric Data Factory

Published 2024-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard continues a series on Microsoft Fabric Data Factory:

In this post, I modify the dynamic parent pipeline from the previous post to explore calling several child pipelines that may be called by a parent pipeline. In this post, we will:

  • Clone the child pipeline (twice)
  • Copy the cloned child pipeline id values
  • Clone the dynamic parent pipeline from the previous post
  • Add and configure a pipeline variable for an array of child pipeline ids
  • Add and configure a ForEach
    • Move the “Invoke Pipeline (Preview)” activity
    • Configure the “ForEach”
    • Configure the “Invoke Pipeline (Preview)” Activity to Use “ForEach” Items
  • Test the execution of a dynamic collection of child pipelines

Andy’s got quite a bit in this post, so check it out.

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Configuring Database Mail in Azure SQL MI

Published 2024-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword sends an e-mail:

SQL Agent jobs allow us to schedule and automate tasks on a SQL Server instance. Crucially, when things go wrong we need to know about them. That’s why we use notifications.

Setting up Operators and job Notifications is as expected on a Managed Instance. However, when it comes to sending the notifications we may have a challenge, as shown in the SQL Agent Error Logs:

Read on for the solution.

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Viewing Total Storage Consumption in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers builds a report:

One of the things I have found when working with my customers in Microsoft Fabric is that there is currently no way to easily view the total storage for the entire tenant.

Not only that, but it would also be time consuming and quite a challenge to then find out what is consuming the storage. Could it be large files or tables or warehouse tables?

In this blog post I will show you how using a Notebook you can get details of the storage across your Microsoft Fabric Tenant.

Click through for an image of the Power BI report and how you can get there.

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Dynamically Start a Child Pipeline in Fabric Data Factory

Published 2024-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard continues a series on Fabric Data Factory design patterns:

In an earlier post titled Fabric Data Factory Design Pattern – Basic Parent-Child, I demonstrated one way to build a basic parent-child design pattern in Fabric Data Factory by calling one pipeline (child) from another pipeline (parent). In a later earlier post titled Fabric Data Factory Design Pattern – Parent-Child with Parameters, I modified the parent and child pipelines to demonstrate passing a parameter value from a parent pipeline when calling a child pipeline that contains a parameter.

In this post, I modify a parent pipeline to explore parameterizing which child pipeline will be called by the parent pipeline. In this post, we will:

  • Copy the child pipeline id
  • Clone a parent pipeline
  • Add and configure a pipeline variable for the child pipeline id
  • Test the dynamic pipeline id

Read on to see how.

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Migrating to Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server from Single Server

Published 2024-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush performs a migration:

Why Migrate to Flexible Server?

  • High availability and disaster recovery: Flexible Server provides higher availability with zone-redundant architecture.
  • Customizable maintenance windows: More control over when updates and maintenance tasks occur.
  • Performance improvements: Fine-tuned scaling and performance adjustments without downtime.
  • Enhanced security: With VNet integration and more advanced networking options.

Read on to learn more about by when you have to migrate and how you can perform the migration.

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Configuring the Fabric Service Principal to Support Storage APIs

Published 2024-10-17 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers grants some permissions:

This blog post explains how to configure access for my Service Principal to interact with the Azure Storage API to use the API to get details for Microsoft Fabric Storage.

This is part of a blog post series where I am going to show you how to “View Total Storage consumed in Microsoft Fabric”

When I started this blog post I realized that I first need to explain how to configure the Service Principal authentication to interact with the Azure Storage API permissions. This is because in my notebook these steps are required for the notebook to run successfully.

Read on to find out how.

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Simplifying Azure Authorization with Managed Identities

Published 2024-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

MIka Sutinen doesn’t need a password:


Managed Identities in Azure provide an efficient and secure way for managing credentials when accessing databases, or other Azure resources. In this post, we build on my recent post about using Service Principal for database authentication, further exploring how we can leverage Managed Identities to simplify the process.

While Service Principals can make some parts of the access management simpler in Azure, you’re still left with several responsibilities in their management.

These responsibilities include rotating secrets and managing the lifecycle of the Service Principal, to name maybe the two most crucial ones. And if you have multiple applications, each with a separate Service Principal, this can be complex to manage.

Click through to learn more about managed identities and service principals, and how they work to link together Azure resources behind the scenes.

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Ingesting Blob Storage Data into SQL Server

Published 2024-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword brings in some data:

We may associate consuming data from Azure Storage with tools like Data Factory or even SSIS as we saw recently. We don’t always need the middle man though.

Here we’ll demonstrate how to use an External Data Source to perform the ingestion directly into SQL Server.

Click through for the solution. As a quick note, the TYPE attribute that Andy uses in CREATE EXTERNAL DATA SOURCE was necessary from SQL Server 2016 through SQL Server 2019, but no longer exists for SQL Server 2022. Instead, for SQL Server 2022, you’d switch the LOCATION to start with abs:// for Azure Blob Storage and PolyBase would infer the type from the protocol.

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