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Category: Cloud

Hybrid Failover Rights from SQL Server 2022 to Azure SQL MI

Published 2023-10-11 by Kevin Feasel

Dani Ljepava explains a new benefit:

Hybrid failover rights is a new benefit that allows you to run a license-free Azure SQL Managed Instance when used as a passive DR replica for your SQL Server 2022 licensed under Software Assurance (SA), or using Pay-as-you-go billing option.

How the Hybrid Failover Rights benefit works

The new Hybrid failover rights licensing benefit is technology agnostic. You can use any technology, such is MI link as the most advanced replication technology using Always On, or perhaps LRS, ADF, transactional replication, backup and restore, or similar to setup replication between SQL Server and Managed Instance. As long as you are using Azure SQL Managed Instance only as a passive replica for your SQL Server 2022, you are eligible to apply the new licensing benefit.

Read on for more details on how you can activate this benefit.

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Auto-Failover Groups in Azure SQL DB

Published 2023-10-06 by Kevin Feasel

Etienne Lopes wraps up a series:

So, first of all, what is Auto-failover groups?

“The auto-failover groups feature allows you to manage the replication and failover of databases to another Azure region. You can include of a group of databases or all user databases in a logical server to be replicated to another logical server. It is a declarative abstraction on top of the active geo-replication feature, designed to simplify deployment and management of geo-replicated databases at scale.“

Read on to see some of the benefits of this, as well as how to enable it.

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Options for Running Jobs against Azure SQL DB

Published 2023-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Norwood replaces on-prem SQL Agent jobs:

Both SQL Server on Azure VM and Azure SQL Managed Instance provide you with SQL Server Agent and therefore the capability to run scheduled tasks against your databases, so when we’re talking about being able to run jobs we’re only considering Azure SQL Database as needing guidance – some of the suggestions  in the following paragraphs can also apply to all these options of SQL Server, but perhaps not as necessary.

We’re going to provide you with four options for how you might be able to still run your favourite SQL Agent Jobs against an Azure SQL Database, each of which come with their own advantages and disadvantages – one not mentioned is Data Factory, sometimes referred to as SSIS in the cloud, and this is because we’re trying to focus on some options that may be more comfortable to people who have never built an SSIS package before.

Read on for the four options Anthony has for us.

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Metadata-Driven Pipelines for Azure Data Factory Loads

Published 2023-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Bushong doesn’t want to copy and paste:

Developing ETLs/ELTs can be a complex process when you add in business logic, large amounts of data, and the high volume of table data that needs to be moved from source to target. This is especially true in analytical workloads involving Azure SQL when there is a need to either fully reload a table or incrementally update a table. In order to handle the logic to incrementally update a table or fully reload a table in Azure SQL (or Azure Synapse), we will need to create the following assets:

  • Metadata table in Azure SQL
    • This will contain the configurations needed to load each table end to end
  • Metadata driven pipelines
    • Parent and child pipeline templates that will orchestrate and execute the ETL/ELT end to end
  • Custom SQL logic for incremental processing
    • Dynamic SQL to perform the delete and insert based on criteria the user provides in the metadata table

Read on for the demonstration, which reads from one Azure SQL DB into another.

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Using DVC to Store Data Science Artifacts in Azure

Published 2023-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video up:

In this video, we introduce DVC, a tool for version control management of data science and machine learning artifacts. We learn why Git isn’t the best place to store those large data files, how DVC integrates with Git, and how you can save your files in Azure Blob Storage.

Click through for the video, as well as a variety of links which helped me put it together.

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Upgrading SQL Server Cloud VMs

Published 2023-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar recommends you check your cloud provider’s VM listings:

If you’ve been in Azure or Amazon for a few years, you’re probably on old, slow hardware.

In the last 3 weeks, I’ve had two clients who’d both been early cloud adopters. When they’d migrated to the cloud, they both used Azure Ev3 VMs – at the time, a good choice for SQL Server due to its relatively high amount of memory. When the Ev3 VM types were announced in 2017, they were hosted on Intel Broadwell and Haswell processors with 2.3-2.4GHz processing speed.

Also, even if you’re locked into a 1-year or 3-year deal, I know that at least Azure is usually willing to switch your VM class registration if you contact your support person. I’m not positive if AWS does the same but it wouldn’t shock me.

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Azure AD (or Entra ID) Authentication for SQL Server VMs

Published 2023-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi 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…

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Azure Blob Storage Operating System Error 86

Published 2023-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jose 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.

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Power BI Shareable Cloud Connections and Multiple Connections

Published 2023-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chris 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.

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