A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
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.
Comments closedIn 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.
Comments closedLance 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.
Comments closedJosephine 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.
Comments closedThis 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.
Comments closedJosephine 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.
Comments closedStephen 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.
Comments closedDimitri Furman fills us in on recent happenings:
To better support Extended Events in Azure SQL, in recent months we have made several improvements. Now, you can:
- View event data in SSMS without downloading xel files from Azure Storage
- Watch live data for an event session
- Use the XEvent Profiler
- Use the histogram target
- Monitor Extended Events performance
- Use granular Extended Events permissions
Much of this is already available in the box product. Dimitri also notes some performance improvements and other updates as well.
Comments closedDan English continues a series:
This is a bit overdue and a follow up to a few other posts I have regarding using Service Principal authentication with Power BI reports Power BI using Service Principal with Synapse SQL Pool and Power BI using Service Principal with Synapse Data Explorer (Kusto) Pool.
With the other two posts I did last year I had to use the SQL Server ODBC driver to get that to work and the big downside to that is that you need to use a gateway with that. Well in this case we are going to take a look at the new Shareable Cloud Connections that were announced earlier this year Streamlining cloud connection management for datasets, paginated reports, and other artifacts | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI
Click through to see what you need to get it working.
Comments closedSo what’s up this time. Our client has moved to Azure in classic lift and shift scenario. Well, almost. They’ve deployed new VM’s and installed SQL Server 2019 Standard in nice DTAP setting. The VM’s are standard E16-4as-v4 SKU. 4 vcpus and 128 GB memory. The disks are Premium SSD LRS ones with 2300 Max IOPS.
Their on-premises environment was a SQL Server 2016 standard edition running on a virtualisation layer with 128 GB of memory and 8 cores.
In both cases there are 2 numa nodes dividing the amount of cores between them.
Read on to learn more about the problem and what Reitse & co did to resolve it. Also check out the comments—Daniel Hutmacher, in particular, I think has the reason nailed.
Comments closed