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Category: Cloud

Batching Text Analytics with Azure AI Services

Published 2023-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland tries out the TextAnalytics client:

We’ll talk about each one of these capabilities briefly as we cover the results, but at a high level what we want to do is:

  • Perform sentiment analysis to determine if the text is positive, negative, neutral, or mixed.
  • Summarize the text using abstractive summarization which summarizes the text with new text generated by a large language model (LLM).
  • Summarize the text using extractive summarization which summarizes the text by extracting key sentences or parts of sentences to convey the overall meaning.
  • Extract key phrases of interest from the text document.
  • Perform entity recognition and linked entity recognition to determine the major objects, places, people, and concepts the document discusses.
  • Recognize any personally identifiable information (PII) present in the document for potential redaction.
  • Analyze the text for healthcare specific topics such as treatment plans or medications.

Read on to see how a certain passage of text fares.

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Saving Money on Azure SQL Database

Published 2023-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard’s speaking my language:

Regular readers of this blog know I am all about saving money. I’ve blogged about ways to set up inexpensive instances of Azure SQL DB. I recently learned a couple new ways to save even more money working with Azure SQL. Both methods begin the same:

Read on for a pair of tips. Serverless mode does work really well for dev environments and cases where you don’t need it up that much (and can wait the 3-5 minutes for the service to spin up the first time you use it that day). But if you’re using it 12+ hours a day, it’s actually more expensive than using the standard model.

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What’s Missing in Azure SQL Managed Instance?

Published 2023-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little gives us the lowdown:

Spoiler: a large amount of features from SQL Server 2022 are missing from Azure SQL Managed Instance. Some major features are missing that were introduced in SQL Server 2019– and here we are just a few weeks away from 2024.

But Microsoft’s top-line marketing claims about Azure SQL Managed Instance remain that “it’s always up to date with the latest SQL features and functionality.”

Let’s dig into some of the documented highlights on missing features, so you can decide for yourself what to think of that statement.

Read on for Kendra’s take. I agree with the overall argument: Managed Instance is an expensive service intended to serve as a SQL Server replacement. But there’s still a lot missing from the product and it still feels like it’s smarter simply to build a VM running SQL Server rather than play the Managed Instance game. Azure SQL DB I extend a bit more grace toward, as its intent is a bit different from the SQL Server box product or Managed Instance.

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Trying out Azure Load Testing

Published 2023-12-14 by Kevin Feasel

Dieu Phan takes us through the Azure Load Testing service:

Azure Load Testing is a fully managed load-testing service that enables you to generate high-scale loads. The service simulates traffic for your applications, regardless of where they’re hosted so I would like to share a walkthrough Azure Load Testing in this post.

Okay, this post isn’t very data platform-centric, but I do like the Load Testing service and think more companies and people should use it.

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Integrating Azure ML and Power BI

Published 2023-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video:

In this video, I show off how easy it is to integrate Azure ML and Power BI, at least once you get past all of the trouble trying to integrate them.

I expected this to be easy. It turns out that the “make it look easy” depends on having several things in place already and using the correct (by which I mean “old”) deployment type.

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SQL Server on Azure Arc Performance Dashboards

Published 2023-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Lance Wright shows off a dashboard:

At Ignite 2023, we announced the public preview of performance dashboards for SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc. With these performance dashbaord, DBAs and IT Admins now get performance monitoring right from within Azure. No need to setup and login to another tool or remotely connect to the SQL Server to run performance queries. Let Azure Arc do the heavy lifting so you can get to your performance metrics faster. 

This is another tool in the toolbox of DBAs, IT admins, and cloud specialists looking to gain better visibility into their hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. If a SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc meets the requirements for data collection (see “How to enable performance dashboards”), Azure Arc will automatically collect the following types of data from the Dynamic Management Views (DMV) datasets oof the SQL Server: 

Click through to see what it includes and how to enable it.

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Replacing the Workspace Summary with Azure Workbooks

Published 2023-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush works around a deprecation notice:

I’m saddened that the Workspace Summary is being deprecated in Log Analytics Workspace. I am trying to reproduce it in workbooks. While it isn’t an exact match, workbooks provide me with enough information to use and share with others.

Click through to see what you could get from the Workspace Summary and how to re-implement a fair amount of that in Azure Workbooks.

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Tracking Inaccessible Azure SQL DB Databases and Customer Key Cycling

Published 2023-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards is watching:

This is the first follow up post from: Azure SQL TDE and Customer Keys (BYOK). Microsoft?…your name isn’t down, so you aren’t coming in. (sqlrod.com) , which explained how to use Customer Keys with Azure SQL DB (and Managed instance), and some of the dangerous pitfalls that you can face. We need to know when there may be trouble on the horizon, so key (pun fully intended) to this is monitoring.

Yes, i’m rambling on again about monitoring…but I like monitoring.

Be seeing you, Number Six.

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Choosing the Right Technology in the Modern Azure Data Warehouse

Published 2023-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush has some advice:

Here’s a quick description of the options we explored:

  • Azure Data Factory – Orchestrates and automates data movement and transformation. You can create workflows, pipelines, and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes using it.
  • Databricks – A unified data science, engineering, and analytics platform based on Apache Spark. It simplifies data exploration, preparation, and machine learning workflows, allowing teams to collaborate efficiently. Interactive notebooks make Databricks a versatile tool for scalable data analysis and processing.
  • Synapse – Integration of big data and data warehousing in the cloud. It facilitates collaborative analytics and AI-driven insights using serverless and provisioned resources across various data sources. Integrated analytics, warehousing, and data integration are part of Synapse’s unified experience.
  • Fabric – An all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that offers data movement, data lakes, data engineering, data integration, data science, and real-time analytics.

Read on for pros and cons of different options Josephine & crew reviewed, as well as the option they landed on and why.

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Updates to Azure Well-Architected Review Assessments

Published 2023-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Stephen Sumner shows off some changes:

Microsoft is excited to announce a significant update to the Azure Well-Architected Review assessment helps you build and optimize workloads. It walks you through a series of questions about your workload. Based on your responses, it generates tailored and prioritized recommendations to improve your workload design. The guidance is actionable and applicable to nearly every workload. It aligns with the latest best practices across the five key pillars of reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence, and performance efficiency (see figure 1).

I’m a big fan of the Well-Architected Framework and the assessments Microsoft has put together. An assessment can take teams within a company days to complete because the questions are so thorough, but once you do get through the list, you’ll get some great practical insights on your setup and what you can do to improve performance and save money.

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