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Category: Cloud

Microsoft Azure SQL Edge Now in Public Preview

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Asad Khan announces the public preview of Azure SQL Database Edge:

Optimized for IoT gateways and devices, Azure SQL Edge extends the industry-leading performance and security of Microsoft SQL engine to the intelligent edge. This small but mighty database engine (<500 MB startup memory footprint) is backed by the same engine that powers Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL and combines all the goodness of the SQL Engine with all new IoT-specific capabilities such as:

– data streaming and time series
– in-database machine learning and graph capabilities
– run on any ARM64- and x64-based devices (*Linux only during preview phase)
– deploy connected, semi-connected or completely disconnected environments

This has the makings of a really good product.

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Accessing Azure from an Android Device

Published 2020-05-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher had a dream:

The other day I had a random thought.

I wonder if there is a version of Azure Portal for Android.

Turns out there is!

This looks most useful for quick observations of machines and services, such as after receiving an alert. But as Kenneth points out, hooking a phone up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse (which, at least on newer Samsung models, is definitely an option) means that you can hit that cloud shell and do most of what you need.

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Taking the Pulse of Your Azure VM

Published 2020-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Broadbent has put together a quick Powershell script to figure out what’s going on with an Azure VM:

I was recently given the task of identifying the state of an Azure VM so that an automation script using the az vm run-command invoke would not fail if the VM was down or under a reboot.

I initially thought the task would be really easy and a simple query of the VM state using Get-AzVM would provide us with a running state property of the VM, but as it happens the state is a little abstracted.

Click through to see how Mark solved the challenge.

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Monitoring Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Pools with Power BI

Published 2020-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Brett Powell has a pair of Power BI templates for monitoring Azure Synapse Analytics:

Upon clicking ‘Load’ you’ll either need to provide your credentials for this source (if you don’t have this data source saved from previous use) or the queries will execute and the following report pages will be available:

– Executions
– Waits
– Sessions
– Waits Detail
– Execution Detail
– Memory
– ExecutionDrillThrough (hidden)

Click through to see what the templates look like and how to obtain them.

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Using Postman with Power BI’s REST API

Published 2020-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld takes us through the Power BI REST API:

Postman is a valuable tool to work with APIs, especially when testing and making ad hoc requests outside of an automated production solution. In terms of where a Power BI developer may find Postman useful, it sits somewhere between the documentation’s “Try It” functionality and a more production-worthy solution incorporating tools like Azure DevOps, Logic Apps/Power Automate, a Power BI custom connector, etc.

The ideas in this post extend an original post from Carl de Souza. Carl shows how to obtain an OAuth2 access token but does so with hardcoded values. Additional API requests use the token from the original response, but he also manually provides this token to those subsequent API calls.

David has a clever technique for getting the bearer token, so check it out.

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Project Metamorphosis: Elastic Kafka Clusters

Published 2020-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Jay Kreps explains what Confluent has been up to lately:

What is Project Metamorphosis?

Let me try to explain. I think there are two big shifts happening in the world of data right now, and Project Metamorphosis is an attempt to bring those two things together.

The first one, and the one that Confluent is known for, is the move to event streaming.

Event streams are a real revolution in how we think about and use data, and we think they are going to be at the core of one of the most important data platforms in a modern company. Our goal at Confluent is to build the infrastructure that makes that possible and help the world take advantage of it. That’s why we exist.

But event streaming isn’t the only paradigm shift we’re in the midst of. The other change comes from the movement to the cloud.

Click through for the high-level. I can see this even more directly competing with Kinesis and Event Hubs.

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Polygon-Based Spatial Searches with Cosmos DB

Published 2020-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran continues a series on spatial data in Cosmos DB:

I want to continue to develop our new map application for Azure Cosmos DB. So far, we can run a custom spatial query in Cosmos DB and display the results on a map. I want my users to create a polygon on map and search for data under this polygon. If you are familiar with Zillow, that is how their application lets you look for houses to buy or rent. You select an area, and Zillow application displays all available houses or rental under the area you draw. It is extremely useful and user-friendly search.

Click through to see how Hasan does it, as well as getting around a coordinate ordering problem.

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Accessing Azure Queue Storage from R

Published 2020-05-07 by Kevin Feasel

Hong Ooi announces a new package for R:

This post is to announce that the AzureQstor package is now on GitHub. AzureQstor provides an R interface to Azure queue storage, building on the facilities provided by AzureStor.

Queue Storage is a service for storing large numbers of messages, for example from automated sensors, that can be accessed remotely via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. A single queue message can be up to 64 KB in size, and a queue can contain millions of messages, up to the total capacity limit of a storage account. Queue storage is often used to create a backlog of work to process asynchronously.

Hong includes a couple of demos as well, so check it out.

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Displaying Cosmos DB Spatial Data with .NET Core

Published 2020-05-07 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran builds up a quick .NET Core app to retrieve spatial data from Cosmos DB and display it:

Cosmos DB stores geospatial data in GeoJSON format. You can not tell what raw GeoJSON represents because usually all it has is a type and bunch of coordinates. Azure Cosmos DB does not have any UI to help you what GeoJSON data looks like on a map either. Only option you have is a third party tool which might display data on a map or Azure Cosmos DB Jupyter Notebooks.

    I want to run a query in Azure Cosmos DB and see the results on a map. I decided to create a simple UI which displays spatial data on a map. I will show you how to do this step by step. I will use LeafLetJs as a map. It is open source and free! Also, I need to create .NET Core 3.1 web application and use Azure Cosmos DB Emulator for data.

Hasan walks us through the demo and promises to put the code in GitHub later.

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Getting Started with MySQL in Azure

Published 2020-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Hyde tries out Azure’s MySQL Platform-as-a-Service offering:

I started out by setting up a dedicated resource group to use for my instance, and then used the Azure Portal GUI to create a new instance named mysql-20200505. I made sure to downgrade from the default General Purpose configuration to Basic, so it will only cost me about $67 a month if I leave it running instead of around $350. After the instance was created successfully I then added some connection security rules to ensure that only my IP was able to connect to it.

I then opened up MySql Workbench to connect to the server as pictured below. Of course it took me two tries to connect as I made my usual error of not including the machine name in the username field the first time around.

Click through for Chris’s early tests.

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