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Category: Cloud

Power Automate Trigger on Power BI Dataset Refresh Completion

Published 2022-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann wants to know when the work is done:

If you have been working with Power BI for a while now you might have come across the standard Power BI actions in Power Automate. They allow you to automate a nice bunch of Power BI processes. But while there is a trigger that starts a flow when a Power BI dataflow action has completed, no such trigger is available for when a Power BI dataset action has (successfully) completed. So here I will present a workaround that is still possible without a premium Power Automate license.

Read on for that workaround.

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General Purpose Serverless Azure SQL DB Performance

Published 2022-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens doesn’t need a server:

In my previous blog I wrote about the premium tier, the one that can be compared with the business critical tier. Now we’re moving away from the DTU models and back to what we DBA’ers really understand, cores, memory and disks. Before I’m going to dive into the limitations, there’s one thing you need to understand. The serverless tier is made for intermittent use. If you’re using the tier for more than 25% of the time (or about 183 hours per month), you’re better of going provisioned. This has nothing to do with performance but everything with cost. The tipping point of provisioned being cheaper is around 25% of the time.

There’s some solid advice on how to get the service to go to sleep but the bulk of the article revolves around performance.

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Failed to Update Server Firewall Rules in Azure

Published 2022-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard gets an error:

Recently, I attempted to update the Networking for an Azure SQL Server I use when delivering training. Specifically, I was attempting to set “Public network access” to “Selected networks,” add my client IP, and check the “Allow Azure services and resources to access this server” checkbox – found on the Networking blade for my new Azure server:

Fortunately, this was a case of “read the actual error message, understand the actual error.” It doesn’t always work out that way but it’s nice when it does.

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Monitoring Blocked Processes in Azure SQL DB

Published 2022-10-05 by Kevin Feasel

Etienne Lopes wants to see what the hold-up is:

Blocked processes (and deadlocks) are often one of the main factors responsible for performance issues in the databases, as such, it’s really important to monitor them effectively and if they exist then understand where, what, why, how often, duration, etc. Having that information will greatly help in the following fine tuning process.

In this post I’ll show one way to easily monitor blocked processes in an Azure SQL database.

Click through to learn how.

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sqlpackage and Managed Identities

Published 2022-10-04 by Kevin Feasel

Nora Yang provides a guide:

– Enable AAD auth on Azure SQL server

– Conn to Azure SQL database via AAD admin

– Create contained user for the managed identity (using Azure VM name as contained username)

        create user <vmname> from external provider;

        alter role db_owner add member <vmname>;

Read on for the full set of steps.

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Interacting with Microsoft Graph API via Synapse

Published 2022-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Hernandez starts a new series:

In this and the next post I want to show you how to connect to the Microsoft Graph API, request some data, process it and store it in a database using Synapse Analytics. 

This first post presents a sample use case, briefly introduces the Graph API, how to create a linked service to it, and how to start querying data. In the next post a sample  Synapse pipeline will be described. The pipeline grabs some data and copies it into some target tables. Finally, I will create a sample query to showcase the newly imported data. 

Because there’s some potential confusion to people, Graph API is completely different from the idea of graph databases.

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Premium Azure SQL DB Performance

Published 2022-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens is moving on up:

The standard tier starts at 125 DTU’s and goes up to 4000. DTU’s are made up from a magic mix of CPU, memory, read iops and write iops. An iop (Input Output oPeration) should be a 4kb (disk cluster size) read or write. 125 DTU translates to 500 Kb/sec up to 32.000 Kb/sec. As we’re used to datapages which are 8Kb in size, you could say these databases are able to pull 62 to 4.000 pages per second from disk. When there are simultaneous writes, you’ll share the performance. At least that’s my interpretation of the IOP. For the DTU part, I’m still struggling to get a good grip on what it exactly is, beyond the magic mix.

It’s also a good idea to compare this to what the Standard tier has to offer. The general data patterns look similar with respect to elbows but the magnitudes are quite different, with Premium P1 starting out around Standard S4 in the test for insertion but more like S3 for selects.

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SQL Server Backup and Restore Operations for S3

Published 2022-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Queiroz shows off something new in SQL Server 2022:

Backup and restore to simple storage service (S3)–compatible object storage is a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2022 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.

There are some differences from other backup operations, so you should definitely read up on it before using it. One interesting side benefit I got to try out recently is that Pure Storage’s FlashBlade product has an S3 API, allowing you to use that interface for backup/restore operations as well as data virtualization.

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Azure SQL MI Error Loading Backup Retention Policies

Published 2022-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Paloma Garcia Martin troubleshoots an error:

When you try to create a new database (*) using Azure Portal using non supported characters, you will see an error indicating characters that you cannot use on the database name.

But if you use SSMS tool, it doesn’t include these characters cheeking and it will not avoid you to use these non-supported characters on the database name. 

Click through for an example of this error in action.

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CI/CD for Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant makes some changes:

In another post I showed how you can use CI/CD to update both ends of Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 using Azure DevOps. Allowing you to update both a SQL Server 2022 database and an Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL Pool in the same deployment pipeline.

By my own admission, that method can become complex. Plus, I showed some more advanced concepts in that post. With this in mind, I have decided to cover an easier way in this post.

Read on for the simpler technique.

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