A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz opens a few ports:
Our customer began to encounter Error 10060 after scaling up to the Business Critical tier. Upon investigation, we realized that the “Proxy” connection type was working, but the “Redirect” type was causing issues.
Read on to see why this happened, as well as what the fix was.
Comments closedDeepthi Goguri enables Azure Entra ID security on a SQL Server VM in Azure:
To enable the SQL Server 2022 on a virtual machine to use Azure AD, we need below things:
Deepthi then includes the list of requirements, starting with a managed identity and moving on to permissions and other configuration. It looks like a fair number of steps, but it’s not that onerous a task once you get to it.
And this also gives me a chance to rant about Microsoft marketing a bit, as they are in the process of switching the name Azure Active Directory to Azure Entra ID. Granted, Azure Active Directory isn’t Active Directory (although it does perform a very similar task in a fairly similar way). So to remove confusion that I don’t think really existed, they changed the name to Entra ID. Except that most of the Microsoft documentation still says Azure Active Directory, and we have about a decade’s worth of blog content talking about Azure Active Directory, so when you go searching for the resolution to a problem, you’ll have to search for Azure Entra ID as well as its former name, which means people will still link the product to Azure Active Directory—at least, until the point when there’s enough blog content and documentation in place to replace the large majority of those existing blog posts—and so you renamed a product for no reason. Plus, they picked an ambiguous name that people will pronounce multiple ways: is the “ent” in Entra like “enter the dungeon” or Entra like “a delicious entrée”?
But then again, considering how many pronunciations of Azure there are, maybe this is the plan…
Comments closedJose Manuel Jurado Diaz 86’d that option:
Today, I worked on a service request that our customer got the following error message: Cannot open backup device ‘https://XXX.blob.core.windows.net/NNN/YYY.bak‘. Operating system error 86(The specified network password is not correct.). RESTORE HEADERONLY is terminating abnormally. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 3201). Following I would like to share with you some details why this issue and the activities done to resolve it.
Read on to get a better understanding of what this error actually means and how you can fix it.
Comments closedChris Webb shows off an interesting aspect of a new feature:
A few weeks ago an important new feature for managing connections to data sources in the Power BI Service was released: Shareable Cloud Connections. You can read the blog post announcing them here. I won’t describe their functionality because the post already does that perfectly well; I want to focus on one thing in particular that is important for anyone using Power BI with Snowflake (and, I believe BigQuery and probably several other non-Microsoft sources): Shareable Cloud Connections allow you to have multiple connections to the same data source in the Power BI Service, each using different credentials.
Read on to see what Chris means and how you can take advantage of it.
Comments closedRui Cunha has a tutorial for us:
Azure Synapse Analytics Serverless SQL is a query service mostly used over the data in your data lake, for data discovery, transformation, and exploration purposes. It is, therefore, normal to find in a Synapse Serverless SQL pool many objects referencing external locations, using disparate external data sources, authentication mechanisms, file formats, etc. In the context of CICD, where automated processes are responsible for propagating the database code across environments, one can take advantage of database oriented tools like SSDT and SqlPackage CLI , ensuring that this code is conformed with the targeted resources.
In this article I will demonstrate how you can take advantage of thee tools when implementing the CICD for the Azure Synapse Serverless SQL engine. We will leverage SQL projects in SSDT to define our objects and implement deploy-time variables (SQLCMD variables). Through CICD pipelines, we will build the SQL project to a dacpac artifact, which enables us to deploy the database objects one or many times with automation.
Click through for the demonstration.
Comments closedEtienne Lopes continues a series on Azure SQL DB HA/DR:
So, first of all, what is Active Geo-Replication?
“Active geo-replication is a feature that lets you create a continuously synchronized readable secondary database for a primary database. The readable secondary database may be in the same Azure region as the primary, or, more commonly, in a different region. This kind of readable secondary database is also known as a geo-secondary or geo-replica.“
Read on to learn more about the topic, including how to set it up and ways to try it out.
Comments closedBrent Ozar answers a question:
I got an interesting request for consulting, and I’m going to paraphrase it:
We were using Azure SQL DB with automatic index tuning enabled for months. Things were going great, but… we just deployed a new version of our code. Our deployment tool made the database schema match our source control, which… dropped the indexes Azure had created. How do we get them back?
Read on for Brent’s answer.
Comments closedThe Big Data in Real World team sees a problem:
There is no separate command in AWS CLI to find the number of objects in an S3 bucket but there is a workaround.
Read on for the solution to this. The way that S3 and Azure Blob Storage (without hierarchical namespaces) store files as tags and treat folders as cosmetic is neat from a technical standpoint, though it goes counter to how we’d expect a file system to behave.
Comments closedBrad Watts writes out some cost data:
Understanding your Azure Spend is one of the most important things you do as an Azure customer. Azure Cost Management is built into the platform to provide you insights. But we live in a world of data and looking at the Azure Cost Management data in a silo may not meet your organization’s needs. In those situations, we can solve that need by putting your Cost Management data into an analytical platform like Azure Data Explorer or Microsoft Fabric KQL Database. Here we can bring in or join additional data that’s useful, run ad-hoc queries and build visualization tying it all together.
Using the below repository, you’ll be able to utilize Azure Cost Management exports to setup an automated process that ingests the cost data into ADX or Fabric KQL Database.
There are several steps involved, but as Brad points out, you can do this either with Microsoft Fabric or with classic Azure Data Factory + Azure Data Explorer. I’d also throw in Azure Synapse Analytics, but that’s not as in vogue anymore.
Werner Zirkel also has a great comment showing how you can cut out most of the steps with Event Grid.
Comments closedZoran Rilak wraps up a series on Azure SQL Managed Instance and its support for private endpoints:
The first two installments of this mini-series discussed a couple of basic and advanced scenarios involving private endpoints. Today we’ll look at some ways private endpoints cannot be used to implement scenarios where one might expect otherwise.
Read on for four of these in total, laying out things you cannot do via private endpoint to a SQL Managed Instance. In fairness, Zoran also provides what I would consider reasonable work-arounds for each of those: have a VM jumpbox in the same virtual network for DAC connections, peer your virtual networks for replication, and so on.
Comments closed