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Category: Cloud

Index Maintenance in Azure SQL DB with Elastic Jobs

Published 2023-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Scott Klein continues a series on index maintenance in Azure SQL Database:

It’s finally here: the third and final blog post about Azure automation. The first blog covered how to automate Azure using Runbooks, the second blog post showed how to do it using Azure Functions, and this blog post will cover how to do it using Azure Elastic jobs.

To be fair, I titled this blog “Automating Azure with Elastic Jobs”, but Elastic Jobs isn’t part of Azure Automation, so please don’t get confused. The goal with this is to demonstrate how to automate some Azure database DBA tasks.

Read on for a brief primer on elastic jobs and how to use them.

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Private Endpoints and Azure SQL Managed Instance

Published 2023-08-18 by Kevin Feasel

Zoran Rilak begins a new series:

Last week we announced the general availability (GA) of private endpoints for Azure SQL Managed Instance. Today, we bring you examples of private endpoints in practical scenarios, starting from the basics and building to the more complex ones to follow in the second installment of this mini-series.

In this post, we’ll cover the following scenarios:

  1. Accessing SQL MI from another virtual network
  2. A more secure kind of public access
  3. Accessing SQL MI from your premises
  4. Making SQL MI available to managed Azure services

Click through to see these four scenarios at the architecture diagram level.

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Creating a Log Analytics Workspace

Published 2023-08-17 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers begins a new series:

As with most of my blog posts it involves a client from a customer where I am consulting, which I think will help others.

The requirement was to analyse the Power BI Query usage patterns of the users. The initial requirement was to find out how many users were using Excel to gain access to the Power BI Dataset.

I knew that I could get this using Azure Log Analytics. Not only could I find out how many users are using Excel, but I could also find out what queries they are running, how long they took.

Read on for the first part in this series, which details setting up Azure Log Analytics.

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Creating Sprint Review Reports with Azure DevOps and Fabric

Published 2023-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant checks the burndown:

In this post I want to cover using Azure DevOps Analytics views and Microsoft Fabric to create Sprint review dashboards.

I consider this post to be a sequel to one of my post popular posts that covered using Azure DevOps Analytics views and Power BI to create Sprint review dashboards. For four very good reasons.

Read on for those reasons, along with the steps Kevin took.

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Lessons Learned from Azure Data Factory Integrating with DB/2 on Mainframe

Published 2023-08-14 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares some thoughts:

I’ve done a few BI integration projects extracting data from ERPs running on IBM Db2. Most of the implementations would use a hybrid architecture where the ERP would be running on an on-prem mainframe while the data was loaded in Microsoft Azure. Here are a few tips if you’re facing this challenge:

Click through for five major points. Surprisingly, one of them isn’t “Avoid DB/2 like the plague.”

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Combining Cosmos DB and Azure Search

Published 2023-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran does some looking:

In my previous post, I discussed the process of establishing a Free-text search for Azure Cosmos DB. Towards the end, I demonstrated how to carry out a free-text search using the Azure Portal. Now, I will guide you on how to perform this search using code. To perform this search by code, I created a basic console application and added Azure.Search.Documents and Microsoft.Azure.Cosmos.

Click through for that demonstration.

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Connecting to SQL Server 2022 via Azure AD

Published 2023-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Goguri makes a connection:

Applicable to-

SQL Server 2022 on-prem on Windows and Linux and SQL Server 2022 hosted on Windows Virtual Machines.

Once you install the SQL Server, there are three different authentication methods that you can use to connect SQL Server along with the Windows and SQL Server authentication. They are –

  1. Azure Active Directory Universal with Multi-Factor Authentication
  2. Azure Active Directory Password
  3. Azure Active Directory Integrated

Read on for the pre-requisites as well as a detailed guide on how to set everything up.

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Finding Service Retirements in Azure Advisor

Published 2023-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Anth Kernan has a tool for us:

Microsoft maintains 77 services across 13 service categories, everything from Artificial Intelligence to Compute to Databases to Storage to Azure Orbital – this is a lot of code and infrastructure to maintain and evolve, often at pace. Inevitably some of these services will be retired, either as new services replace them or through investments in the Microsoft Partner ecosystem.

This article will provide an overview of the tooling that exists within Azure to obtain a single centralized view of Service Retirements and reduce the reliance on manually checking the Azure Updates feed and/or Email notifications.

Click through to see where the tool is in Azure Advisor. Taking a quick look at it, this is pretty smart.

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Migrating Cosmos DB Tables API

Published 2023-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin handles a migration:

A few months ago, I was involved in an interesting project where a large customer (not to be named due to NDA) needed to migrate their entire Azure cloud subscription to another subscription. This was a difficult and arduous process that involved several PaaS technologies, besides SQL Server, that I didn’t have experience with before.

But it presented very interesting challenges and opportunities to learn new things.

One of these was the need to migrate an entire Azure Cosmos DB with Table Storage API account from one subscription to another.

Read on for the challenge, the intermediate solution using the Cosmos DB Data Migration Tool, and Eitan’s Powershell script to automate the process. I know and work with most of the people working on the DMT and they’re good folks.

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Creating a Power BI VNet Data Gateway

Published 2023-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria rolls up her sleeves:

If you are using Power BI to connect to a PaaS resource on a virtual network in Azure (including private endpoints), you need a data gateway. While you can use an on-premises data gateway (the type of Power BI gateway we have had for years), there is an offering called a virtual network data gateway that is currently in preview.

The VNet data gateway securely communicates with the data source, executes queries, and transmits results back to the service, just like the on-premises data gateway. But it doesn’t require us to provision a virtual machine in the same network (or a peered network) of our Azure data source.

Read on to see some important caveats, as well as a step-by-step guide.

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