A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Eugene Meidinger busts out the calculator:
If you’ve dealt with Power BI licensing before, Fabric licensing makes sense as an extension of that model plus some new parts around CUs, bursting and smoothing. But what if you are brand new to Fabric, Power BI, and possibly even Office 365?
Read on for the basic requirements, as well as building from there.
Leave a CommentKristina Mishra takes us down an alley of pain:
If you’ve bought a P1 reserved capacity, you may have been told “No worries – it’s the same as an F64!” (Or really, this is probably the case for any P to F sku conversion.) Just as you suspected – that’s not entirely accurate. And if you are trying to create Fabric shortcuts on a storage account that uses a virtual network or IP filtering – it’s not going to work.
The problem seems to lie in the fact that P1 is not really an Azure resource in the same way an F sku is. So when you go to create your shortcut following all the recommend settings (more on that in a minute), you’ll wind up with some random authentication message like the one below “Unable to load. Error 403 – This request is not authorized to perform this operation”:
On the “oof” scale, this rates as “big oof.” Kristina shows some of the differences between P SKUs and F SKUs and why it matters, as well as two unpalatable solutions if you happen to be using a P SKU.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld shares an experience:
Last week, I had a situation in which a client wanted to purchase a reserved instance Fabric capacity. Me being me, I assumed it would be super straight forward to purchase through Azure. However, at some point I was lost in the process where the official documentation confused even more. In the end, I figured out and managed to get a capacity running based on the Reserved Instance pricing. I didn’t find any other blogs or articles describing this confusion or specific case. Therefore, I decided to write down my thoughts and findings in a blog.
This blog is not only relevant if you work with Microsoft Fabric, but also for anyone currently working with Power BI Premium. Given the deprecation of Power BI Premium capacities, you have to switch to Fabric capacities sooner or later.
Read on to learn more about the differences between pay-as-you-go and reserved instance capacities, the process to make a reservation, and what comes after that before you have a Microsoft Fabric capacity ready to go.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld breaks out the green eyeshade:
P-SKUs, A-SKUs, EM-SKUs and now we also have F-SKUs… all these different capacities that are out there today each have their own specifics. Lately, I’ve been in a lot of conversations around Fabric capacities. There seems to be some unclarity around what you pay for in the end and how it compares to Power BI Premium capacities. Therefore, I thought, maybe this is the right time to write it down – besides the Microsoft documentation that is already out there.
In this blog I will elaborate on differences in purchasing, billing and buying the capacities. I will not deep dive in capacity metrics or how capacity units are consumed.
There’s a lot of good information in the article, especially if you’re looking to price out Microsoft Fabric in your organization.
Comments closedDavid Eldersveld talks licensing:
To facilitate a smooth transition from Power BI to Fabric (new capabilities), Microsoft ensured customers could access these new Fabric workloads as well as Copilot for Power BI on their existing Power BI Premium capacity P SKUs.
However, with the introduction of Azure-billed pay-as-you-go and annual reservation F SKUs for Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft recently announced the eventual retirement of the Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs that needs to consider an organization’s Enterprise Agreement (EA) timing.
Read on to learn more, especially if you currently have a Power BI Premium P1 (or higher) SKU.
Comments closedJulia Liuson talks about big licensing news:
Today, Redis, a leading provider of in-memory data store solutions, announced a transition in its open-source licensing approach. Redis is moving away from the BSD 3-Clause License to a dual-license model, offering developers the choice between the Redis Source Available License version 2 (RSALv2) or the Server-Side Public License version 1 (SSPLv1).
Read on to learn what this means for Azure Cache for Redis.
Comments closedJonathan Katz share some thoughts:
(Disclosure: I’m on the PostgreSQL Core Team, but what’s written in this post are my personal views and not official project statements…unless I link to something that’s an official project statement 😉
I was very sad to learn today that the Redis project will no longer be released under an open source license. Sad for two reasons: as a longtime Redis user and pretty early adopter, and as an open source contributor. I’ll preface that I’m empathetic to the challenges of building businesses around open source, having been on multiple sides of this equation. I’m also cognizant of the downstream effects of these changes that can completely flip how a user adopts and uses a piece of technology.
Read on to learn about why Jonathan believes (with good reason) Postgres’s license is a lot more sticky.
Comments closedArun Sirpal reads the fine print:
This is the managed instance link feature; I really like this, if you know about Distributed AGs then you may know they are tricky to setup (well I found this) but Microsoft takes care of this out of the box.
The point of this quick blog is not how to set this up but the benefit of enabling the Managed Instance as “ license free “ via the hybrid failover rights option – do not forget about this.
Read on for the list of requirements.
Comments closedMorgan Oslake has an announcement:
Optimizing resource allocation to achieve performance goals while controlling costs can be a challenging balance to strike especially for database workloads with complex usage patterns. Azure SQL Database serverless provides a solution to help address these challenges, but until now the general availability of serverless has only been available in the General Purpose tier. However, many workloads that can benefit from serverless may require greater performance and scale along with other capabilities unique to the Hyperscale tier.
We are pleased to announce the general availability of serverless auto-scaling for Hyperscale in Azure SQL Database. The benefits of serverless and Hyperscale now come together into a single database solution.
Read on to see what this means for you and how it can change the billing strategy around Hyperscale.
Comments closedKendra Little makes a recommendation:
The Business Critical service tier in Azure SQL Managed Instance is a lot more expensive than General Purpose. For the extra money, you get a different architecture.
Is it worth the extra cost? Spoiler: your mileage will vary, but probably not. Let’s talk about why.
Time to put the wallet away, I suppose.
Comments closed