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Category: Cloud

Start and Stop for Managed Instances

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal pushes the big red button:

We all would like to save money when operating in the cloud, Microsoft has released a stop / start concept for SQL Managed Instances – preview mode!

At the time of writing, the Managed Instance needs to be built from the November wave where you will see the functionality in the overview section and it has to be in the General purpose tier. If you have managed links or failover groups then you cant use this feature.

There is a kicker, however, which makes this a less-than-pleasant option. Arun has more detail.

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DB Restoration and Upgrade Management for Arc-Enabled Data Services

Published 2023-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Warwick Rudd continues a series on Azure Arc-Enabled Data Services. Part 9 covers database restoration:

Now that we have our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance deployed, potentially one of the most common tasks you will need to undertake is being able to perform a database restore of an existing database to your newly provisioned Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.

In our previous post, we deployed our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance – “ae-sqlmi-demo” that we will continue to investigate and learn about how we can utilize in our data environments. In this post, we are having a look at restoring a database.

Part 10 looks at upgrade management:

Managing your Data Controller through Azure Data Studio provides an easy approach for controlling when you wish to apply upgrades supplied by Microsoft. This is something you need to stay on top of as the upgrade path is an incremental approach and only allows you to upgrade to the next version. If you leave it too long, you could be faced with multiple upgrades to be undertaken. This could lead to extended outages while you get up to date.

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Translation in Power BI via Cognitive Services

Published 2023-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati gets lost in translation:

There is a possibility to call cognitive service for translation inside Power Query.

I will use this to translate 3000 rows of data about people arrested in Iran for protesting; This information contains city Name, Fullname and Other statements.

In this article, I will show how to call cognitive services for translation, create a proper JSON call and finally, use it inside Power Query.

Read on for the translation in Power Query, specifically from Farsi to English.

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Using Managed Identities with Azure Functions

Published 2023-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres takes us through the proper use of managed identities:

Let’s talk about authentication between Azure Functions and resources used by Azure Functions and conclude with many poorly documented secrets about how to use User Assigned Managed Identity. When we build Azure functions, they usually need to authenticate against other Azure resources: Azure SQL Database, Storage Accounts, Service Bus and many more.

Each of these services have an authentication that we can call “Meh!”: Azure SQL has SQL Standard Logins, storage accounts have SAS tokens, service bus, shared access keys and so on. These are not the safest methods possible. If the key leaks, you will have a security problem because anyone with the key will be able to access the resource.

There are multiple solutions for this problem, some of them would pass through Key Vault, used to store secrets, keys and passwords. But let’s go directly to the best one: Remove the usage of keys at all. 

Read on to learn how.

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Cosmos DB to Data Explorer Synapse Link

Published 2023-01-05 by Kevin Feasel

Vicent-Philippe Lauzon makes an announcement:

We recently made our new Kusto data connection available in public preview:  Cosmos DB to Azure Data Explorer Synapse Link.

This does look like a marketing-heavy announcement but the short version is that you can ingest data from Cosmos DB into Data Explorer pools via Synapse Link rather than creating your own ETL process. The previous Cosmos DB connector for Synapse Link tied to a dedicated SQL pool.

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Alert Setup with Azure Monitor

Published 2022-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Sunil Verma sounds the alarm:

For this instance, we will setup an alert and action to determine and send out a notification when a Virtual machine has been stopped and also could be restarted whenever such conditions has met.

1. Firstly, Go to search pane on the Azure portal search monitor, click on alert inside monitor and create an alert rule. Further, specify a scope for what you want to setup alert. On this occasion, I am setting it for virtual machine.

Read on to learn more about what Azure Monitor does, as well as the steps to set up an alert and an action.

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Moving Stack Overflow to Azure

Published 2022-12-28 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand gets into the whats and wherefores:

Like many companies, Stack Overflow is trying to get out of the business of running our architecture in our own data centers; instead, we want to offload some of the more mundane parts of system administration to a cloud service offering like Azure.

I’m going to cut to the chase for the purpose of this article and concede we’ve already decided on Azure for the majority of our infrastructure and, most importantly to me, our databases.

Click through to learn what their plan is and why Aaron & co went that particular route.

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Script Activity Outputs to ForEach Inputs with ADF

Published 2022-12-23 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria links in a script:

In early 2022, Microsoft released a new activity in Azure Data Factory (ADF) called the Script activity. The Script activity allows you to execute one or more SQL statements and receive zero, one, or multiple result sets as the output. This is an advantage over the stored procedure activity that was already available in ADF, as the stored procedure activity doesn’t support using the result set returned from a query in a downstream activity.

However, when I went to find examples of how to reference those result sets, the documentation was lacking. 

Click through as Meagan corrects a gap in documentation.

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