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Category: Cloud

Invoke External REST Endpoints from Azure SQL DB

Published 2022-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Farley is impressed:

This internal procedure is new in Azure SQL DB in 2022. I think it presents a significant change to the way we do things in the world of SQL, and makes some other tools a whole lot more useful as well.

sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint lets me send data to a REST API from within a stored procedure. Invoking an HTTP REST endpoint – as simple as that. And while I know you’re probably thinking, “But I can send data to a REST API from anywhere – why do I need to do it from within a stored procedure?”, I want to describe a few scenarios to you.

I like having the functionality, though would want to control how frequently my teams would use it. The reason is that this potentially makes your database the a domain boundary (when thinking in domain-driven design concepts).

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Continuous Backup for Cosmos DB

Published 2022-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Manvendra Singh wants a backup:

This article will explore Continuous backup and steps to configure it for a new Azure Cosmos DB account or an existing Cosmos DB account. Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed and highly secure, NoSQL database service on the Azure cloud that is designed for modern-day application development. It automatically runs backup for its databases on separate Azure blob storage at regular intervals without affecting the performance, availability, and provisioned resource units (RUs) to ensure data protection from a data recovery standpoint which can be needed in case of data corruption, deletion, or wrongly data updates.

Click through for the process and some limitations.

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Monitoring Azure SQL DB Restore Progress

Published 2022-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Sudhir Raparia doesn’t have time to wait:

Database Backup & Restore capabilities are crucial for ensuring Business continuity and Disaster recovery. Restore database operation is usually done in critical situations like hardware failure, application errors, ransomware attacks, accidental deletion of database etc., to restore a production database to latest known stable state. In such critical situations users would want to track the progress of restore operation accurately so that they can plan for subsequent actions and/or alternatives.

Currently in Azure SQL DB, you can view the database restore progress either using Portal or using T-SQL as follows:

Click through for information on that DMV, as well as a recent change to it in Azure SQL DB (though not yet Azure SQL Managed Instance).

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Sending Messages to Event Hub via Python

Published 2022-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kiril Nikolov has a message for us:

Recently I needed to create an Azure Function app that would connect to an API and send data to an Event Hub as part of a real-time data streaming solution.

Azure functions are the perfect connectivity option for a task like this, allowing you to focus on the trigger and the resulting output message you want to capture in the event stream, while Azure handles the maintenance of the cloud infrastructure and hosting to run it.

Azure functions can be written in multiple languages. I needed to write mine in python, meaning that I had to set up a configuration file to connect to the Event Hub (as I will explain in further detail below).

Click through to see how it all works.

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Azure SQL DB Performance: Business Critical Tier

Published 2022-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens continues the comparison:

My last blog was about the Hyperscale tier, this week we’re back at more regular designs with Business Critical. This design is aimed at performance, local SSD storage and better CPU’s. But that’s not all. Besides this high-speed design, it also has high availability implemented by having a secondary replica ready to take over when the primary fails for any reason. And not just one but three replicas. So, your data should be accessible at all times. To make it even better, you can make one of these replica’s the read-only replica for reporting purposes. I’ve tested most tiers, again I didn’t test the 80 cores SKU because of the price. I also did some testing with and without replica’s but there wasn’t much of a difference. But again, my testing setup is quite simplistic, for your heavier read and write loads it might make a huge difference.

Read on for this and see how it compares to some of the other Azure SQL DB tiers.

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Time Travel with Delta Tables in Synapse

Published 2022-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Liliam Leme reverses the clock:

Scenario

While working with a customer, they had a requirement to restore modified files to a specific point in time. They had built their architecture on top of a Data lake.

Looking for options

While working on this scenario, we explored some storage options available without any side customization, for example, Soft delete for blobs – Azure Storage | Microsoft Docs.

Read on to see what they landed on.

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Azure SQL Trigger for Azure Functions

Published 2022-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Skwiers-Koballa announces a new feature:

The Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions uses SQL change tracking functionality to monitor a SQL table for changes and trigger a function when a row is created, updated, or deleted.  Change tracking is available for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server, making the Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions a flexible component for event-driven applications.

Similarly to the Azure SQL bindings for Azure Functions, a connection string for the SQL database is stored in the application settings of the Azure Function and supporting authentication options such as managed identity. In addition to the connection string, the SQL trigger is configured with a table name. The SQL trigger is specified on lines 12 and 13 in the C# Azure Function example below, which will log information about each change made to data in the dbo.Employees table.

Read on to see how it works.

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Working with Multi-Channel Bots in Azure

Published 2022-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland creates a mega-bot:

The Azure Bot Service is effectively a registration for a conversational AI application on Azure. This registration allows you to connect a deployed chatbots to a wide number of supported channels that users can use to interact with the bot.

This lets you build one bot that can serve a variety of users across multiple different channels, including both text and voice channels.

Additionally, the Azure Bot Service gives you a centralized place to manage, secure, and monitor your bot, regardless of which channel people use to interact with your app.

Read on for an important caveat, as well as more information on Azure Bot Service.

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The Importance of the Power BI Service

Published 2022-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains why the Power BI Service is useful:

The Power BI toolset comes in many shapes and forms. There is a Power BI Desktop, Power BI Mobile app, Power BI Report Server, and Power BI Service (and some other applications and components too). The questions I hear from the new users of Power BI are; Do I need to have an account for Power BI? do I need to use the Power BI website for creating visualization etc.? What is the Power BI website or service, and what is its usage? If I can do the reporting using Power BI Desktop for free, then why would I need the service? In this article and video, I will answer all of that.

Click through for a video or for the article explaining the purpose behind the Power BI Service. Having done work with places using Power BI Report Server and places using the Power BI Service, I will say that the latter takes more work to get corporate-compliant but offers a whole lot more.

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