A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Wolfgang Strasser sees a new role:
I’ve spotted a new Azure Purview permission level – Policy Authors. This new permission level is connected to the new Data Access Policy Management in Purview (as of today 2021-12-30 in preview; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/purview/how-to-access-policies-storage)
Click through for a little bit more detail.
Comments closedWolfgang Strasser has a future review of past activities:
Yesterday, Andy Cutler (t) asked me on twitter, if the move of a registered source between collections is possible.
My first answer was, yes sure… And I also included a screenshot from one of my Purview accounts (which – this will be important in the following – is a legacy Purview account).
But – tech isn’t tech without some differentiation between versions and available options
Read the whole thing.
Comments closedAngela Henry wraps up a series:
Welcome to the final installment of our Azure Purview Series, focusing on Purview Data Map. The Purview Data Map is the foundation for data discovery and serves as the jumping-off point for all things data source related. It is the cloud-native platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that collects the metadata about your data sources and runs the scans to keep your metadata up to date.
Click through to see what’s available in Data Map and information on how to kick off and view scans.
Comments closedWolfgang Strasser investigates an issue:
In my last Azure Purview Quickstart video (#3 – Create an Azure Purview Account – link), I’ve shown you how to create a new Azure Purview account.
And what pre-prepared demos have in common, well – it “just” works there
BUT: there are some requirements that need to be configured beforehand, in order to create an Azure Purview Account.Basically, problems during the creation process can be listed to:
– Security / permissions
– Missing Resource providers
Read on to learn more about permissions requirements and how to deal with these issues as they arise.
Comments closedAngela Henry continues a series on Azure Purview:
In our previous article for this series, Purview Part 2: Data Catalog, we examined the portion of the end user experience where people will spend the majority of their time. But the question is, how does that Data Catalog get populated? The Data Catalog is populated by the Scanning and Classification features of Purview, which is the focus of this article.
Click through to see what you need to set up and how the process works.
Comments closedWolfgang Strasser has some good news for us:
It’s been a long and intensive discussion – the (initial) pricing structure of Azure Purview. As I already talked about it in my Purview pricing blog post, the basic cost calculation involves
– the cost for the data map (= the infrastructure to store metadata and provide the Purview UI + cataloging functionality)
– plus the costs involved for scanning sources.
And that has added up to a significant amount of money, especially in dev/test scenarios. But read on for the glad tidings Wolfgang has to share.
Comments closedDaniel Janik treats Azure Purview scans like pets rather than cattle:
If you’ve ever been a DBA and seen the mess that you get with SQL Agent Jobs without a clean naming standard for your job schedules and job names then you’ll appreciate this tip.
If you haven’t been a DBA that’s OK too. Years ago I came up with my own naming standard for SQL Agent artifacts and I’ve always felt better when the messy room was clean. No Really! That’s exactly what this is like. A messy room where you are pretty sure you put the item you’re looking for in but you just can’t seem to find it until you clean 95% of the mess and then you’re so exhausted that you don’t have time to do what you wanted to in the first place. Ever been there?
Read on to see what the scans look like by default, as well as some thoughts Daniel has regarding a better way to do things.
Comments closedAngela Henry continues a series on Azure Purview:
The Data Catalog portion of Purview is where most people will spend their time. It provides the information about your organizations data assets in a searchable format. Depending on which level of Data Catalog you choose; you can also access a business glossary, lineage visualization, catalog insights, and sensitive data identification insights. This article will focus on the three different levels available within Data Catalog and offers scenarios demonstrating when you would use each offering.
Read on for the three tiers, all of which are currently free but that won’t stay the case.
Comments closedThis post is going to be restricted to only SQL Server Table Columns and only Extended Properties named MS_Description. Quite a few years ago I worked on a data catalog project where we added descriptions for many of the tables, views, and columns to the database using extended properties named MS_Description. Let’s assume you have some of these for this post keeping in mind that the Purview APIs provide so many functions beyond what this post covers and that the code here could be modified to do so much more as well.
Starting out I thought it would be great to import the sensitivity classifications that SSMS creates. Pre-SQL 2019 these were held in Extended Properties and now have their very own DMV (sys.sensitivity_classifications). While this sounded great in theory it wasn’t as exciting when I wrote the code. This is because Azure Purview already has system classifications at a more granular scale for each of the ones you find in SSMS and Purview also adds these as it executes a scan on the data source. It does a pretty good job too. With that said, I shifted my focus to adding descriptions instead.
Read on to see how you can do this.
Comments closedAngela Henry gives us an overview of Azure Purview:
Organizations are amassing more data than ever, yet it is getting more difficult for their employees to find that data and use it with confidence. What if there was a solution out there that not only told us what data sources we have, but could tell us how those data sources should be used, and who the stewards/producers of that data are? What if it could allow us to classify our data, and provided us insights into what our entire data estate looked like? It might sound like data nirvana, but it just might be possible with the newest Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering from Microsoft, Azure Purview.
In the first part of the series, Angela covers the basics and pricing, so check it out.
Comments closed