Adam Saxton hits on an important topic:
Can we use source control with Power BI? We get this question ALL THE TIME! Adam walks you through what your options are and how this works today with Power BI.
Read on to learn Adam’s answer.
Comments closedCategory: Deployment
Kevin Chant demystifies GitHub Actions:
In this post I want to share how to deploy from one source to multiple SQL Server database types using GitHub Actions. Because I did a demo of it at Data Saturday Redmond last weekend.
By the end of this post, you will know more about how to do this using GitHub Actions. If you are used to Azure DevOps, you will find this an interesting comparison.
Previously I did a post about how you can do this using Azure DevOps. You can read that post in detail here. Later in this post I also mention an older post here a couple of times so it’s worth keeping that open.
Read on to learn how.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers shows off an interesting scenario:
In this blog post I am going to demonstrate how to make a granular deployment where I will create a new column in my City table, and only deploy those changes.
What this means is that by deploying only the column change to my PPU dataset, I am only updating the column in the table.
This now saves me from doing the following tasks previously:
– Time taken to refresh the PBIX file so that the data is up to date.
– Re-uploading my PBIX.
– If configured re-creating the incremental refreshing
– Time and effort to upload and wait for dataset refresh.
– Quick updates to my dataset.I will not have to worry about saving my PBIX file, file and if configured re-creating the incremental refreshing. This saves me a lot of time and effort.
Click through to see those steps in action.
Comments closedToday I’d like to talk about three error messages you might see when deploying an SSDT database project, either through Visual Studio or via a dacpac and script. I’m going to focus here on what you see from inside of Visual Studio, but you will see similar errors returned when you deploy using a script and the reasons behind them will be the same.
Read on for Chris’s findings. These errors definitely aren’t a complete survey of possible messages, but they do hit some of the less obvious cases.
Comments closedChris Adkin has two additional parts of a series. Part 3 shows us how to deploy a virtual machine on VMware:
To do this you require an Ubuntu virtual machine, I’ve tested this with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and I will get around to testing it with Ubuntu 20.10 at some stage. If for example the virtual machine was created with a user called azuser, the deployment server should also have an azuser account under which all Terraform commands are executed.
Part 4 takes those VMs and set up a Kubernetes cluster across them:
Whatever you do when deploying a Kubernetes cluster, somewhere along the line you have to use kubeadm. There is a wealth of material available on blog posts and on the internet in general in which people roll there own scripts using kubeadm. I often suspect that many of these efforts are the result of Kelsey Hightower’s: Kubernetes the hard way. In this post we are emphatically going to do things the easy way, […]
And now we’re caught up on the series…for the moment, at least.
Comments closedChris Adkin has started a series on deploying Azure Arc enabled Data Services. Part 1 serves as an introduction
:One of the most significant things to change the landscape for Azure data professionals will be general release of Azure Arc enabled Data Services. To provide an expedient means of experiencing all that Azure Arc has to offer, Microsoft has come up with Jumpstart – a collection of GitHub repos for deploying Arc in different scenarios. Last Christmas I had a few vacation days and took the opportunity to try out Jumpstart for Azure Arc enabled data services on AWS. AWS was my choice because it made a certain amount of sense to try out Azure Managed SQL Server instances and Postgres Hyperscale on a cloud that they are not natively available on. After all, the whole point of Azure Arc enabled Data Services is to bring Azure to you on your terms if for any reason you cannot use the Azure cloud.
Part 2 gives us an introduction to Terraform:
Before diving into what the various Terraform modules do that make up the Arc-PX-VMware-Faststart repo, I’m going to provide an introduction to Terraform in this blog post. Terraform comes from Hashicorp, it is a tool that works on the principle of infrastructure-as-code. Resources are specified in what are called configuration files using Hashicorp Control Language in a declarative manner, i.e. you state what you want and to the best of its ability Terraform attempts to create those resources for you. ‘Providers’ are used to create resources for particular types of entity, for example you might use local file, helm (the Kubernetes package manager), Azure, VMware providers etc. etc. . . . Using providers requires plugins, most of which are provided by Hashicorp, but third parties can write their own plugins also.
Check out the first two posts in what promises to be an interesting series.
2 CommentsJohn Martin has an interesting use case for tagging in Terraform:
One of the key properties missing from Azure resources, in my opinion anyway, is a CreatedDate. This can be largely overcomes with Azure policy, but what if you don’t have access to create one that applies a timestamp tag at resource creation?
It is possible to use Terraform to tag the resource and set the value for when the resource is created. There is a little more work that needs to go into it to ensure that once it is set that Terraform does not overwrite it on subsequent deployments. But, it is achievable and brings this into your control if needed.
Click through to see how.
Comments closedElizabeth Noble shows us how to create a database publish profile using Visual Studio:
One of our fears was always how to prevent losing data and critical data code. Here were publish profiles to our rescue. We also found that some of our database code had specific values depending on the environment or contained references to other databases. Once again, publish could solve these problems!
While I’d love to say that you could use ADS to manage your database projects, that just isn’t true right now. However, we have a way to help you get a publish profile created. If you don’t want to use Visual Studio yourself, you might want to ask your Developer friends real nice and see if they’d be willing to help you out.
Click through for a video and a sample of what a publish profile looks like.
Comments closedMark Wilkinson shares a script with us:
If you are not familiar, SendTo options are those available when you right click on a file/folder in file explorer and select the Send To option in the menu. When you use this option, the currently selected files/folders are passed to the SendTo shortcut as a space delimited list of files and folders. This is important to know so you better understand what needs to be done to read that list.
I can confirm that this works well for deploying script out, especially when they need to go to multiple servers or multiple databases on servers. That functionality takes a bit more effort to write, but combine Mark’s code with Jess’s and you are well on your way.
Comments closedJohn Martin shows how to deploy a database schema (in bacpac format) via Terraform:
It’s all well and good deploying Azure SQL Database resources as we did in the previous post. However, databases tend to work a little better with a schema and some data in them. One of the options for getting data from an on-premises SQL Server database into Azure SQL Database is via a bacpac. This is, at its core, an export of the schema and data into a single file which is then created and loaded to Azure SQL Database. Much the same as a MySQL dump operates.
Read on for one way to do this.
Comments closed