Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Cloud

Persisting Data in Azure Redis Cache

Published 2022-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal feeds the mogwai after midnight:

I mentioned before that you could use the idea of data persistency to rebuild your data from total failure. There are two types. RDB and AOF.

RDB – persists a snapshot of your cache in a binary format. The snapshot is saved in an Azure Storage account. AOF – saves every write operation to a log. The log is saved at least once per second into an Azure Storage account. 

I’m a big proponent of using Redis as a caching service. I’m not a big proponent of using Redis as a persisted database, mostly because I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with persistent Redis…

Comments closed

Change Data Capture in Azure SQL Database

Published 2022-04-28 by Kevin Feasel

Abhiman Tiwari announces that CDC has gone GA:

CDC is now generally available on Azure SQL databases, enabling customers to track insert / update / delete data changes on their Azure SQL Database tables. On Azure SQL database, CDC offers a similar functionality to SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance, providing a scheduler which automatically runs change capture and cleanup processes on the change tables. These capture and cleanup processes used to be run as SQL Server Agent jobs on SQL Server on premises and on Azure SQL Managed Instance, but now they run automatically through the scheduler in Azure SQL databases. Customers can still run scans and cleanup manually on demand.

Looks like it works pretty much the same as on-premises SQL Server, so it’s got that going for it.

Comments closed

Deploying an Azure Function via Azure DevOps

Published 2022-04-28 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck wants to deploy a Powershell-based Azure Function:

In the blog post Azure Function with PowerShell and the Power BI REST API I explained how you could create an Azure Function using the PowerShell scripting language. This Function connected with the Power BI REST API and retrieved the last refresh status of a dataset. Developing the Function is one thing, deploying it is another. In this blog post I’ll guide you through the set-up of a build and release pipeline in Azure Devops. As a prerequisite, the Azure Function and its dependencies (for example the requirements.psd1 file) are all checked into a Git repo. As a reminder, the folder structure looks like this:

Read on for the walkthrough.

Comments closed

Azure Databricks Security Considerations

Published 2022-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Craig Porteous provides some advice on configuring Azure Databricks:

Azure Databricks is an analytics platform and often serves as the central compute component of a data platform, to process ETL/ELT data pipelines and data science workloads. As Databricks is a third-party platform-as-a-service offering securing it works differently to most other first-party services in Azure; for example, we can’t use private endpoints. (More on these in the Azure Storage post)

The two main approaches to working with Databricks in our secure platform are VNet Peering or VNet Injection

Click through to learn the difference between these two, as well as a few other factors to keep in mind as you’re deploying Databricks.

Comments closed

Logic Apps: Source Control and Deployment

Published 2022-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck has a two-parter. First up is storing Logic App code in source control:

At a data warehouse project I’m using a couple of Logic Apps to do some lightweight data movements. For example: reading a SharePoint list and dumping the contents into a SQL Server table. Or reading CSV files from a OneDrive directory and putting them in Blob storage. Some of those things can be done in Azure Data Factory as well, but it’s easier and cheaper to do them with Logic apps.

Logic Apps are essentially JSON code behind the scenes, so they should be included into the source control system of your choice (for the remainder of the blog post we’re going to assume this is git).

The second post covers deployment:

It’s easy to duplicate an Azure Logic App in a resource group, but unfortunately you cannot duplicate a Logic App between environments (you might try to copy paste the JSON though). So unless you want to hand craft every Logic App yourself on each of your environments, you need a way to automatically deploy your Logic Apps. It’s easier, faster and less error-prone than any manual method.

Check out both posts.

Comments closed

Imagining a SaaS Plane for Data Mesh in Azure

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew shares some deep thoughts:

For part 7 of this series, I want to explore what else could be delivered in our Azure Data Mesh if we continue our established thinking around the planes of interaction for our data products. As with part 6, we are still missing good Azure Resources that can deployed for certain situations. However, I want to frontload some concepts now, so we are ready if/when a suitable technical answer arrives in the cloud.

Note that this is all speculative. It’s interesting speculation, though.

Comments closed

Cross-Subscription Restore for Dedicated SQL Pools

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Howard announces some good news:

We are excited to announce the release of cross-subscription restore. This has been one of our top requested features from customers as it unlocks multiple scenarios from dev/test to simplified billing at the subscription level for restored data warehouses.

Click through to see how you can do this. There was a workaround in the past but this should be quite a bit faster.

Comments closed

Azure Redis Tips

Published 2022-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal enumerates some advice:

My learnings on Redis thus far which you may find useful:

1. Location of Redis should be close to your app.

2. Data structures within Redis, larger key value sizes lead to fragmentation of memory space and these larger memory requirements means more network data transfer, Redis states to use 100KB maximum, this will affect the transfer time allocated from the app. It could time out if the data request is big.

Click through for the rest of Arun’s advice. My advice on the 100KB maximum is that it really should be closer to 100 bytes or 1KB max in practice, especially for storing data which differs by entity (user, customer, organization, whatever your domain uses).

Comments closed

Using the master dacpac in Azure DevOps

Published 2022-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck makes use of system databases in a database project:

I have a database project in Visual Studio. Inside the database, I use a couple of system views to fetch some metadata about tables. To make the project build successfully, you need to add a reference to the master database in the project.

That all works fine but there’s a bit more you need to do before Azure DevOps can work with the file. Read on to learn what that thing is.

Comments closed