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Category: Cloud

Azure Functions and Azure SQL Database

Published 2022-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta builds a simple Azure Function:

As a Platform as a Service (PaaS) service, Azure SQL Database enables developers to deploy SQL Database in Azure Cloud without managing the infrastructure. We use SQL Server Agent to schedule jobs to run at a specific schedule in an on-prem SQL instance. However, Azure DB does not have agent functionality.

There are multiple ways to schedule job or batch processes in the Cloud. You can explore the Azure automation series for executing scripts using Azure Logic apps and automation runbooks.

This article focuses on the Azure functions for scheduling a job for Azure SQL Database.

Read on for the process.

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Azure SQL News

Published 2022-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Anna Hoffman brings us tidings:

Emily Lisa kicked it off by telling us about the latest Azure SQL Database product updates including Azure SQL maintenance windows, zone redundancy for SQL Hyperscale, and configurable backup storage redundancy for SQL Hyperscale.

Dani Ljepava from the Azure SQL Managed Instance product team came on to share a range of new features announced at SQL Bits now available in public preview: Link feature for Managed Instance, data virtualization with ADLS, Advanced notifications for planned events, Hybrid Service Broker, Windows authentication for Azure AD Principals, and the general availability of Maintenance windows. Watch the episode to see a special look at Link feature for Managed Instance!

Pam Lahoud also came on to talk about about the latest improvements that help you manage your SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines, including the newly released SQL best practices assessment, all available to you by installing the free SQL IaaS Agent extension!

Read on for plenty more links and updates.

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Summarizing Data Mesh in Azure

Published 2022-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew wraps up a series:

When we consider this in the context of what I’ve already established in part 1 of the series, I focused on our data products and ownership. Now I want to re-introduce our data domains as a level above our data products. We can even consider this a hierarchy.

– Data Domains

– Data Products

Why?

Read on for that answer.

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Data Virtualization with Azure SQL Managed Instance

Published 2022-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Mladen Andzic announces data virtualization in Azure SQL Managed Instance:

Data virtualization capabilities, now in preview in Azure SQL Managed Instance, enable you to execute Transact-SQL (T-SQL) queries against data from files stored in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 or Azure Blob Storage and combine it with relational data stored locally in the managed instance using logical joins. This way you can transparently access external data while keeping it in its original format and location. There is no data duplication or need to run and maintain ETL processes, which means that you can extract and deliver insights faster. Currently supported file formats are Parquet, CSV, and JSON.

I’m going to start calling it PolyBase Duck Typing: it’s not actually PolyBase but the syntax is the same and the outcome is the same and the method to enable it is the same and “PolyBase” is a lot easier to say than “data virtualization.” So even though it’s not PolyBase, I’m going to call it PolyBase until there’s a meaningful split.

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Stringing Azure Data Factory between VNets

Published 2022-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Ahmed Mahmoud performs networking wizardry:

Customer wants to connect Azure Data Factory on one subscription to an Azure SQL Server on Virtual Machine (SQL VM) on another subscription. check out the architecture diagram below for more clarification.

Click through for that diagram as well as the process. And between VNet peering and Private Link, I believe (but could be wrong in saying) the traffic would never leave Azure-hosted machines even when it transits between subscriptions.

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Executing SQL Statements in Azure Data Factory

Published 2022-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Abhishek Narain announces a pretty nice improvement to Azure Data Factory and Synapse Pipelines:

We are introducing a Script activity in pipelines that provide the ability to execute single or multiple SQL statements.  

Using the script activity, you can execute common operations with Data Manipulation Language (DML), and Data Definition Language (DDL). DML statements like SELECT, UPDATE, and INSERT let users retrieve, store, modify, delete, insert and update data in the database. DDL statements like CREATE, ALTER, and DROP allow a database manager to create, modify, and remove database objects such as tables, indexes, and users.

Be sure to read the limitations at the bottom, however.

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Deleting an RDS Instance

Published 2022-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan takes out the trash:

We’ve created an AWS RDS instance and logged into it successfully. One thing to remember when creating test instances is when to them when you’re finished. While a lot of test instances I’ve created have been free tier, it’s still good to clean up rather than leave instances lingering. Today, let’s clean up a test instance.

Click through for the step-by-step on how to do this.

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Form Recognizer Updates

Published 2022-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Vinod Kurpad shares some news:

Form Recognizer continues to improve product capabilities with improved models, support for additional document types and containerized solutions that run in the cloud or on premises either connected or fully disconnected for scenarios where containers need to run in an isolated environment. Recent updates to pricing include commitment tiers for customers who have a predictable volume of documents. Starting February 15th, the pricing for Invoices and General Document API will drop to $10 per 1000 pages, an 80% reduction, making it possible for customers to use invoices and the general document APIs for high volume scenarios to significantly lower cost while providing additional value.

That’s a pretty big improvement.

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Authenticating with s5cmd

Published 2022-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino has the need for speed. And authentication:

At work, I get to work with some fantastic tech that pushes the boundaries of performance. I needed to do some performance testing from a Windows server into a FlashBlade using s3. I reached out to a colleague of mine, Joshua Robinson, who told me about s5cmd. s5cmd is a very fast, parallel s3 compatible command-line client.

Check out Joshua’s post for some performance numbers. Here’s a direct quote from his post.

But it doesn’t matter how fast it is if you can’t connect, so Anthony shows us how to do just that.

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