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Category: Cloud

Data Masking in Azure Databricks

Published 2025-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Rayis Imayev hides some information:

One way to protect sensitive information from end users in a database is through dynamic masking. In this process, the actual data is not altered; however, when the data is exposed or queried, the results are returned with modified values, or the actual values are replaced with special characters or notes indicating that the requested data is hidden for protection purposes.

In this blog, we will discuss a different approach to protecting data, where personally identifiable information (PII – a term you will frequently encounter when reading about data protection and data governance) is actually changed or updated in the database / persistent storage. This ensures that even if someone gains access to the data, nothing will be compromised. This is usually needed for refreshing the production database or dataset containing PII data elements to a lower environment. Your QA team will appreciate having a realistic data volume that resembles production environment but with masked data.

Rayis goes into depth on the process. I could also recommend checking out the article on row filters and column masks for more information.

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Connecting a Web App to Azure SQL DB via Entra Managed Identity

Published 2025-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni doesn’t have time to create a password:

Managed identities in Microsoft Entra have simplified authentication in Azure, particularly If all of your resources are in Azure. In this basic example, I’m going to walk you through connecting a Web App (aka App Service) running an API server to an Azure SQL Database. The best part? There are no passwords involved–let’s get started.

Read on for the process. It’s interesting to see how far identity-based security has developed in Azure over the years.

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Azure VM Constrained CPU and SQL Server Licensing

Published 2025-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards works to save some money:

Our SQL servers have specific loads, patterns and resource requirements. We’ve monitored them, we know what they are inside and out. You know that x number of CPUs, and y GB or RAM means that your DBs happily sweat the hardware, but are sized to perfection to make sure it has just enough resource to complete what it needs to do. The negotiations with your Infra team in command of the VM resources were tough, but you’re not greedy… you appreciate that other VMs may require resource as well…

Now you have to migrate to Azure, and SQL on Azure VM is your only option. Great, loads of different types/flavours of VMs out there, one of them must be in the the goldilocks perfect porridge zone right? Right?

Licensing around this gets a little weird. Basically, Rod is absolutely right that an E64-16, for example, would require 16 cores of SQL Server, and that can save a good bit of scratch. For the OS, however, you’re paying for 64 cores, so keep that in mind while you’re rolling in a bed of the cash you’ve saved on SQL Server licensing.

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An Overview of Managed SQL Server(ish) Offerings

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Mika Sutinen rounds up the usual suspects:


AWS, Azure and GCP all have a fully managed services for SQL Server databases. In this post, I’ll provide a brief overview of the offerings from these hyperscalers. While the main promise of the service remains the same across the hyperscalers, the capabilities, scale, and occasionally, the best use scenarios for each, differ.

Read on for a quick comparison of four offerings from the three cloud providers.

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Free Azure SQL Offerings

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword has the right price in mind:

Its the time of year where things may winding down for the new year and we can get a bit of breathing room. With that free time you might want to try something new, let’s say some SQL Server in the cloud?

It could be a good time to start brushing up on new skills, seeing what the services have to offer, or maybe you want to start blogging!

You’re not going to be able to do a tremendous amount at these tiers, but it’s hard to beat that price.

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Microsoft Fabric and Power Platform Resources

Published 2024-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Voege has a collection of links for us:

This week, to round off the year, we try something different. I wanted to throw a shout out to all the community heroes out there, who also help make the most of Microsoft Fabric, through the use of Microsoft Power Platform (and vice versa).

Also, I wanted to highlight some of their contributions, and hopefully give you all a list of resources to peruse.

Click through for more than 20 links, showing how you can work with Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Pages, and data in Dataverse from Microsoft Fabric.

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Azure AI Foundry Notes

Published 2024-12-27 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun wraps up a series on Azure AI. First up is tracing in Azure AI Foundry:

Tracing is a powerful tool that offers developers an in-depth understanding of the execution process of their generative AI applications. Though still in preview (in the time of writing this post), It provides a detailed view of the execution flow of the application and the essential information for debugging or optimisations.

After that, we can see how to evaluate model results:

With evaluation you performing iterative, systematic evaluations with the right evaluators and measure and address potential response quality, safety, or security concerns throughout the AI development lifecycle, from initial model selection through post-production monitoring.

With the Evaluation in Azure AI Foundry, you can evaluation the GenAI Ops Lifecycle production. In addition, it also gives you the ability to  assess the frequency and severity of content risks or undesirable behavior in AI responses.

Finally, Tomaz wraps up the series with some notes on documentation:

Documentation and material for Azure AI Foundry are plentiful and growing on a daily basis, since the topic on AI and GenAI is evermore so popular.

I appreciate the challenge that Tomaz has of putting together 25 blog posts in a month, especially when they’re all tied to a single theme.

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