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Category: Cloud

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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CI/CD for Synapse Serverless SQL Pool with SqlPackage and Azure DevOps

Published 2023-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Rui 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.

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Trying out Azure Geo-Replication

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Etienne 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.

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Restoring Azure SQL DB Indexes

Published 2023-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brent 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.

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Finding Object Counts for S3 Buckets

Published 2023-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

The 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.

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Sending Azure Cost Management Data to Azure Data Explorer

Published 2023-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Brad 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.

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Don’t Try These with SQL MI and Private Endpoints

Published 2023-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Zoran 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.

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Restoring Backups from S3 to Azure SQL MI

Published 2023-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Strahinja Rodic announces a new feature going to GA:

In September last year SQL server 2022 introduced new feature – backup and restore to simple storage service (S3) – compatible object storage that grants the user the capability to back up or restore their databases using S3-compatible object storage, whether that be on-premises, or in the cloud.

To provide this integration Azure SQL MI is enriched with a new S3 connector, which uses the S3 REST API to connect to Amazon S3 storage. It extends the existing RESTORE FROM URL syntax by adding support for the new S3 connector using the REST API.

Click through to see what you need to have set up for it to work, as well as the restoration process.

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Scale-Out Read-Only Databases in Azure SQL DB

Published 2023-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Etienne Lopes begins a new series:

“As part of High Availability architecture, each single database, elastic pool database, and managed instance in the Premium and Business Critical service tier is automatically provisioned with a primary read-write replica and one or more secondary read-only replicas.”

Read on to see how you can add support for read-only, scale-out replicas to an existing Azure SQL Database. Just know how much that bill is going to be.

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Australian Azure Downtime After-Action Report

Published 2023-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar shares some thoughts:

Note that 11:34, the decision was made to shut down infrastructure without Microsoft failing your databases over elsewhere. If you were an Azure SQL DB or Cosmos DB user, and you weren’t paying for replicas in another data center, it was up to you to follow Microsoft’s disaster recovery guidance.

Controversial opinion: I actually love that and I think it’s great.

That is definitely a controversial opinion, but it’s also one I agree with. Read on for more of Brent’s thoughts.

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