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Category: Cloud

Azure Test Plan Terminology

Published 2021-07-28 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant is here with a language lesson:

In this post I want to cover some Azure Test Plans jargon for Data Platform professionals. Because I understand it can be confusing.

In addition, I did say I would explain some jargon in my last post about using Azure Test Plans for Data Platform deployments. Of course, these explanations will help with other kinds of deployments as well as Data Platform ones.

By the end of this post, you will have a better understanding of some of the jargon involved in Azure Test Plans. Plus, a good recommendation of a lab to use.

Click through for that depiction.

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Connecting to Azure Blob Storage from Power BI

Published 2021-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Kristyna Hughes links Power BI to a data source:

The step-by-step process below walks through connecting to data housed in Azure Blob Storage from Power BI using a SAS token. There are many ways to grab your data from Blob Storage, but this is the most efficient, scalable, and secure way that I found (with some security restrictions from watchful DBAs).

Click through for the solution, which is based on using SAS tokens.

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Deploying Azure Policies via Terraform

Published 2021-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan D’Aloia shows how you can use Terraform to work with Azure Policies:

As you may all know Terraform serves a great purpose in deploying resources and infrastructure into your Azure environment, however, Terraform can also be used to automate and consistently deploy Azure Policies which can be defined prior to any resources being generated. In this blog, I will cover how you can import policies into your Terraform State to then deploy into an Azure Resource Group in order to secure your landing zone prior to deploying any resources.

Click through for an example.

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Querying Private Blob Storage Containers with Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2021-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres looks at some private information:

The queries from the previous article were made against the public container in the blob storage. However, if the container is private, you will need to authenticate with the container. In this article, you’ll learn how to query private blob storage with SQL.

NOTE: Be sure that the Azure Synapse Workspace and the storage account with the sample files are set up before following along with this article. You will also need to replace your storage account URL each time that a storage account URL is used in the article.

There are three possible authentication methods, and these methods may have some variation according to the type of storage account and the access configuration. I will not dig into details about storage here and leave that for a future article.

Read on for the three authorization methods and a lot of detail on using SAS tokens (the preferred method) to access this data.

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Combining Change Data Capture with Azure Data Factory

Published 2021-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens continues a series on learning Azure Data Factory:

In my last blog, I pulled all the data from my table to my datalake storage. But, when data changes, I don’t want to perform a full load every time. Because it’s a lot of data, it takes time and somewhere down the line I’ll have to separate the changed rows from the identical ones. Instead of doing full loads every night or day or hour, I want to use a delta load. My pipeline should transfer only the new and changed rows. Very recently, Azure SQL DB finally added the option to enable Change Data Capture. This means after a full load, I can get the changed records only. And with changed records, it means the new ones, the updated ones and the deleted ones.

Let’s find out how that works.

Read on for the article and demonstration.

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Differences in Logging between Azure Analysis Services and Power BI PPU

Published 2021-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers continues a series on migrating from Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium Per User:

Another important aspect when having datasets is being able to log and monitor performance. In this blog post I am going to compare the logging between Azure Analysis Services (AAS) and Power BI Premium Per User (PPU).

With the recent release of PPU having integration with Log Analytics it makes it a lot easier to compare the logging options between AAS and PPU.

This is an area where there’s still a bit of a gap. Click through to see what the differences look like today.

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A Primer on Azure Kubernetes Service

Published 2021-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal gives us a brief introduction of Azure Kubernetes Service:

You have the ability to run these on-premises (complex) or in a cloud service, like AWS or Azure. Hence AKS – Azure Kubernetes Service which helps reduce the complexity and operational overhead of managing Kubernetes by offloading much of that responsibility to Microsoft. You may be wondering how does containers relate to this? It was something on my mind when I first entered into this technology. Remember that containers is the next step beyond traditional virtualisation, you can run SQL Server Linux in containers, as an example. I then look at AKS as the “management” layer of the container solution, carrying out tasks such as scheduling, scaling, health, load balancing and host management.

Click through for more information.

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Managing Spatial Data in Azure

Published 2021-07-19 by Kevin Feasel

Rolf Tesmer takes us through the different Azure services which offer some ability to work with spatial data:

Every now and then you come across a use-case where you need to do something with spatial data, and you need to do it in the cloud (Azure, of course)! Up until that very point you maybe didn’t know, or perhaps even care, much about the intricacies of spatial data assets, let alone how the heck you were going to store it, process it, and query it, without making a mess of your current data stack.

Well, if you’re that person, then I say welcome to this blog post!

Click through for a fairly lengthy list, including Rolf’s comments on each. Also note the one big omission from the list as far as data platform products.

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Parameterizing ADF Pipelines

Published 2021-07-19 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens continues a series on learning Azure Data Factory:

In my previous blog I created the integration runtimes, and the linked services. However, we need to create new datasets. If you remember, and I don’t blame you if you don’t, the dataset I created contained a reference to a table. That’s nice, but this time we don’t want just one table, we want a number of tables.

Click thorugh to check it out.

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Renaming a YAML Pipeline in Azure DevOps

Published 2021-07-15 by Kevin Feasel

Hamish Watson figures out what’s in a name:

I had created a pipeline using YAML – which was called InfrastructureAsCode as the YAMP file was in the root directory.

However I wanted to move it into a folder .\InfrastructureAsCode\pipelines\… and run the YAML file from there – as I would have a non-prod and PROD version of them (as the schedule was different for each).

Click through to see how Hamish was able to resolve this.

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