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Category: Cloud

Index Maintenance in Azure SQL DB

Published 2023-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little gives an answer:

Have you ever received advice that was technically correct, but which was delivered in such a way that it was too hard to understand?

I think of this as “accidental bad advice,” because it leads to confusion. There’s a LOT of accidental bad advice out there on index maintenance for SQL Server and cloud versions like Azure SQL, even in the official documentation.

In this post I’m answering a common index maintenance question, and we’re going to keep it simple.

The answer is essentially the same as it would be on-premises: yes, but perform index maintenance when it is appropriate. Read on to learn what that means in this case.

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Using the Azure Data Factory Self-Hosted Integration Runtime

Published 2023-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chen Hirsh hosts a runtime:

In Azure data factory (ADF), An integration runtime is a compute resource to run your pipelines on. When you run an application on your computer, it uses the computer resources, such as CPU and memory, to run its tasks. When you run activities in a pipeline in ADF, they also need resources to do their job, like copying data or writing a file, and these are provided by the integration runtime.

When you create an instance of ADF, you get a default integration runtime, hosted in the same region that you created ADF in. If you need, you can add your own integration runtimes, either on Azure, or you can download and install a self-hosted integration runtime (SHIR) on your own server.

Read on to understand when you would want to use a self-hosted integration runtime and the process to do so. This SHIR also applies to Synapse pipelines and is one of the few ways to move data out of a Synapse workspace with data exfiltration protection enabled.

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Users and Role Members for Azure SQL Databases

Published 2023-07-13 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Schott makes a list:

I ran into a concern to quickly audit all current users and role members for a set of Azure SQL databases, spread across multiple resource groups. Without an easy CMS concept or a way to quickly loop through an unknown set of servers, resource groups, and databases, that can be a little challenging. I have an account to use that should have access to all databases (but doesn’t) so put together some PowerShell that I could run locally to get that information and send the results to Excel.

Click through for a SQL script to get the data and a Powershell script to run this for each database and export the results into different tabs in Excel.

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Azure Stream Analytics No-Code Editor

Published 2023-07-12 by Kevin Feasel

Xu Jiang shows off a new designer:

Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed stream processing engine designed to analyze and process large volumes of streaming data with sub-millisecond latencies. Using a SQL-like query language, it empowers you to analyze your streaming data efficiently. It only takes a few clicks to connect to multiple sources and sinks, creating a Stream Analytics job. 

The no-code editor offers an intuitive user experience that enables you to develop Stream Analytics jobs effortlessly, using drag-and-drop functionality, without having to write any code. It further simplifies Stream Analytics job development experience. With just a few clicks, you can quickly develop jobs to handle diverse scenarios in just minutes. It is available in the Azure Event Hubs portal, and now in Azure Stream Analytics portal as well.

Read on to see what it looks like and what you can do with it.

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VBS Enclaves for Always Encrypted in Azure SQL DB Elastic Pools

Published 2023-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Pieter Vanhove makes an announcement:

A few months ago we announced the support for virtualization-based security (VBS) enclaves in Azure SQL Database. This announcement brings numerous advantages, including robust confidential queries and seamless cryptographic operations, to all Azure SQL Database offerings, independent from the underlying hardware. You can use the feature with any compute tier (provisioned or serverless), purchasing model (vCore or DTU), compute size and region that aligns with your workload needs. And, since VBS enclaves are available in existing hardware offerings, there is no additional cost.

In addition to this preview, we are excited to announce the preview of VBS enclaves in Azure SQL Database elastic pools!

Read on to learn more about how to enable enclaves and add a database to an elastic pool.

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Performance Optimizing Cosmos DB

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Harshvardhan Singh has a few tips for us:

As with the other databases, indexing is the first go-to option to improve query performance. The same is the case with Cosmos DB as well. Below are a few points which you can leverage to optimize the indexing strategy for Cosmos DB. 

Indexes are kind of similar to indexing in SQL Server in intent, though different enough in implementation that you’ll want to read up on them. Harshvardhan also includes some tips around data modeling and querying data.

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Azure DataSync: Cannot Insert NULL Value

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz does some sleuthing:

In this blog article, we will delve into a common error encountered when synchronizing data with Azure SQL DataSync. We’ll explore the error message “Error #1: SqlException Error Code: -2146232060 – SqlError Number: 515, Message: Cannot insert the value NULL into column ‘ID’, table ‘dbo.Customers’; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails. SqlError Number: 3621, Message: The statement has been terminated.” We will provide a detailed explanation of the error and its possible causes, followed by a T-SQL code snippet that reproduces the error scenario.

Click through for four possible causes.

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Creating a Simple Video with Azure Open AI and Cognitive Services

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Sabyasachi Samaddar has an interesting project:

In today’s digital age, video content has become a powerful medium for communication and storytelling. Whether it’s for marketing, education, or entertainment purposes, videos could captivate and engage audiences in ways that traditional text-based content often cannot. However, creating compelling videos from scratch can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.

Fortunately, with the advancements in artificial intelligence and the availability of cloud-based services like Azure Open AI and Cognitive Services, it is now possible to automate and streamline the process of converting text into videos. These cutting-edge technologies provide developers and content creators with powerful tools and APIs that leverage natural language processing and computer vision to transform plain text into visually appealing and professional-looking videos.

This document serves as a comprehensive guide and a starting point for developers who are eager to explore the exciting realm of Azure Open AI and Cognitive Services for text-to-video conversion. While this guide presents a basic implementation, its purpose is to inspire and motivate developers to delve deeper into the possibilities offered by these powerful technologies.

Click through for a guide on how to do it.

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Exiting the Cloud to Save Money

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

David Heinemeier Hansson shares a story:

The back of the napkin math is that we’ll save at least $1.5 million per year by owning our own hardware rather than renting it from Amazon. And crucially, we’ve been able to do this without changing the size of the operations team at all. Running our applications in the cloud just never provided the promised productivity gains to do with any smaller of a team anyway.

I’ve never been a big fan of the “Move to the cloud to save money!” story that vendors tell. There are specific advantages, but saving money (as in, my overall IT expenditures are less than what I was spending before moving to the cloud) is more rare than common, in my experience.

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