A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Gilbert Quevauvilliers troubleshoots an error:
What I did learn when working through the blog post is that I ran into some errors when trying to re-connect or trying to connect to the Azure Storage in my Premium App Workspace and it failed.
The errors that I got were, “We couldn’t connect to Azure, but it’s likely temporary. Try again later or see details.”
Read on for the cause and the solution.
Comments closedDenny Cherry walks us through gateway logging in Azure:
If you’ve ever set up an Azure Network Gateway for Site to Site or Person to Site VPNing you’ve probably wanted to be able to see logging from the gateway. In the Azure portal, you can see a Logs option, but all it does is tell you to set up log analytics and the link that it gives you is … less than helpful.
Denny, however, has helpful instructions, so check it out.
Comments closedManoj Raheja tries announces another pool type:
At Ignite, we announced the public preview of Azure Synapse data explorer that makes it possible to query huge amounts of structured, semi-structured, and free-text telemetry and time-series data. The following are some of the key capabilities that make this possible:
– Powerful distributed query engine that indexes all data including free text and semi-structured data. The data is automatically compressed, indexed, auto-optimized, and cached on local SSDs and persisted on storage. Compute and storage are decoupled that gives you full elasticity to auto scale in/out without a downtime.
– Intuitive Kusto Query Language (KQL) that is highly optimized for exploring raw telemetry and time series data using Synapse data explore’s best-in-class text indexing for efficient free-text search, regex, and parsing on traces\text data.
– Comprehensive JSON parsing capabilities for querying semi-structured data including arrays and nested structure.
– Native, advanced time series support for creation, manipulation, and analysis of multiple time series with in-engine Python and R execution support for model scoring.
Click through for a demonstration, showing that this is for more than just logs.
Comments closedJoe Obbish reaches for the top shelf:
At Microsoft Ignite 2021, public preview for new “premium-series” hardware was announced for Azure SQL Managed Instances. There’s even a black friday sort of sale during this month where you can do testing on premium-series VMs without paying for the compute costs. As someone without free cloud bucks: sign me up!
I did some basic query benchmarking to get an idea of the performance difference between the new premium VMs and the standard gen 5 VMs. The test VMs aren’t identical in specs: the standard-series has 4 vCore with 20.4 GB of memory and the premium-series has 8 vCore with 56 GB of memory. I will attempt to call out any situations where that spec difference had a measurable impact.
Read on for Joe’s findings.
Comments closedJames Serra has a round-up of Ignite 2022 announcements:
Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra: Is now GA. Cassandra is an open source, column family store NoSQL database. The Azure Cassandra service includes an automatic synchronization feature that can sync data between with customers’ own Cassandra instances, on-premises and elsewhere. More info
Wolfgang Strasser has some thoughts as well on what Ignite has shown us so far:
As you might have noticed, Azure Purview is one of my newest friends in Azure Data town. During Ignite, the support for Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), the Data Lake Data Asset Access Governance, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Integration with Azure Purview was announced.
What I really look forward to test is the Data Asset Access Governance for Data Lake storages. Imagine a world that allows you to define permission on a central place and those permissions are brought to a storage account / system of your choice..
Read both of them for two different perspectives.
Comments closedEbru Ersan announces a new preview:
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to learn if your SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines was configured optimally? Do you have the right options set? Do you have your tempdb on the right disk? Can your queries perform better? All these and more can be answered using the new Azure portal experience on the SQL virtual machine resource page. SQL Assessment feature, once enabled, will evaluate your SQL Server on Azure VM against configuration best practices to determine if your system is healthy and setup for success. This feature is currently in preview. We would love to hear your feedback.
Click through to see it in action.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld wants to refresh a single table:
Back in February, I wrote a blog on how you can trigger a single table to refresh in your Power BI data model. This blog described how you can achieve this goal using a PowerShell script and the ASCmd cmdlets for Analysis Services, which also works for Power BI Premium. In the wrap-up of that blog, I promised to follow-up with a blog on how to achieve the same goal with Azure Data Factory. It took a little bit longer than expected to finalize this post, but here it is!
In this blog, co-authored by my colleague Paulien van Eijk, we will describe how you can automate your single table refresh in the Power BI Service, including all dependencies with downstream dataflows using Azure Data Factory and Azure Automation. All this is based on real life scenarios and a solution build in collaboration between Dave Ruijter, Paulien and me.
Read on for Marc and Paulien’s solution.
Comments closedNiels Berglund uses Kafka Connect to link an Apache Kafka topic to Azure Data Explroer:
If you follow my blog, you probably know that I am a huge fan of Apache Kafka and event streaming/stream processing. Recently Azure Data Explorer (ADX) has caught my eye. In fact, in the last few weeks, I did two conference sessions about ADX. A month ago, I published a blog post related to Kafka and ADX: Run Self-Managed Kusto Kafka Connector Serverless in Azure Container Instances.
As the title of that post implies, it looked at the ADX Kafka sink connector and how to run it in Azure. What the post did not look at was how to configure the connector and connect it to ADX. That is what we will do in this post (and maybe in a couple of more posts).
This post serves as a complete tutorial, though Niels does promise future posts on other ingestion methods, so stay tuned.
Comments closedRandolph West has a series on ledger tables in SQL Server. First up is a primer on the topic:
System-versioned ledger tables leverage the same technology: there is a table with current data in it, and an underlying history table which keeps track of changes. However, it uses a cryptographic chain that provides digital forensic evidence of tampering. Yes, if you’ll pardon the use of this phrase, I’m talking about a blockchain.
This is not a cryptocurrency. No one is using expensive graphics cards to produce a fiat currency in someone’s basement. Instead, each transaction affecting the database in question is cryptographically hashed using a SHA-256 algorithm and then stored somewhere off-site.
Part two separates out the two types of ledger table:
This week we will look at the different types of ledger table: append-only and updatable.
Unlike temporal tables, a ledger table can be append-only which makes it immutable. You can only insert data and therefore it does not need a history table. In fact, you may be using append-only tables in your data warehouse already. While this is secure, it may not be practical.
Part three covers limitations:
Every choice we make is a trade-off. New features have limitations, and ledger tables are no exception.
Some of these limitations are perfectly sensible. For example, the whole point of ledger tables is to ensure that we can provide tamper evidence. This necessarily means you can’t turn it off once it’s enabled, unless you drop the database entirely — this is just one scenario where a full defence-in-depth strategy is required.
Part four is the one I’ve been waiting for—an explanation why you probably don’t need this:
After writing several posts about a neat feature in Azure SQL called system-versioned ledger tables, it reminded me about something I’ve wanted to say for a number of years now, outside of snarky tweets.
Here goes:
You don’t need a blockchain.
In the vast majority of use cases, you need a properly audited relational database system with ACID compliance and a good recovery strategy.
There are very specific use cases in which data hashes and ledger tables make sense.
Comments closedErik Darling airs some grievances well ahead of Festivus:
This post is admittedly short, but since we’re short of First Party Solutions™ to gripe to Microsoft with… I need to save this stuff somewhere.
Click through for Erik’s notes and commentary.
Comments closed