Category: Cloud

Nick Edwards shows off the Switch activity in Azure Data Factory:

Prior to the switch statement I could achieve this using 4 ‘IF’ activities connected to a lookup activity as shown in the snip below using my ‘Wait’ example pipeline.

However a neater solution is to use the ‘Switch’ activity to do this work instead. I’ll now jump straight into a worked example to show you how I achieved this.

Click through for the demo.

Hasan Savran shows off how we can use user-defined functions to add custom application logic to operations in Cosmos DB:

There are couple of things you need to know about them. First, User-defined functions are only for reading data. User-defined functions will always require more Request Units than regular SQL queries. You should always try to solve your application logic problem with regular queries first. Get familiar with system functions, be sure that you are not trying to write a user-defined function when there is already a system function solving the same problem. System functions will always use less Request Units than your custom user-defines function. Just like SQL Server, User-defined functions will cause a table-scan in Cosmos DB. That is why they cost more than regular queries. If you want to use the User-defined function in a where clause. Try to filter by other properties too. Other properties might hit to indexes and that will help you with request units.

Click through to see an example of them in action.

Eitan Blumin has a roundup of Azure-related announcements:

On the week of December 7th (especially on December 9th), Microsoft has sent us a whole bag of goodies, announcing the general availability of new features that were only in preview until now, and even newer features that have just entered public preview.

There’s quite a lot to cover here, so let’s try to break it down by categories and provide links for more details. 

Click through for the list.

John Morehouse does not abide by Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

While I’m a firm believer that the cloud is not a fad and is not going away, it’s just an extension of a tool that we are already familiar with.  The Microsoft marketing slogan is “It’s just SQL” and for the most part that is indeed true.  However, that does not mean that every workload will benefit from being in the cloud.  There are scenarios where it does not make sense to move things to the cloud so let’s take a look at a few of them.

Read on for several reasons why the cloud might not be right for you.

Denny Cherry argues that you should not consider a cloud provider as a single point of failure:

Having a two cloud providers isn’t going to save you from an outage. The public cloud providers (Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google GCP, etc.) have specifically designed their networks so that an outage at one region doesn’t impact other regions.

The day before US Thanksgiving (November 25, 2020), AWS had a major outage where the east-us facility suffered an outage for several hours. But you’ll notice something very interesting about this outage. No other AWS region was impacted by this outage. This is a very important distinction, as it shows that having multiple regions within AWS would give a solid Disaster Recovery strategy a great fail-over experience.

I’m mostly in agreement with Denny on this, but then I’d also have to point out the Azure AD issue which crippled Azure work across the globe, or the Azure DevOps service going down for a period of time (because everything was hosted in one data center and there was an issue). Depending on just how important uptime is, it can still make sense to be multi-cloud, especially if we use a broad enough definition which includes on-premises as a “local cloud.” In extreme cases—say, you lose millions of dollars per hour of downtime—the cost of a belt + suspenders approach is well below the expected loss from an outage.