I wrote before about Automating table Refresh in Power BI. On that article I explained how to schedule a refresh script using the Azure Automation Account. We can improve the automation process even more. If we create a parameterized Powershell script and publish it to github, the script becomes available in the Automation Account gallery. … Read more
On the article Automating table refresh in Power BI I explained many methods to automate refresh of individual objects, which could be tables or partitions. This creates the need of good ways to visualize the last refresh date and time for each partition and table. The portal shows the refresh date/time for the entire dataset, … Read more
Blueprints are (or should be) an important feature for Azure Cloud provisioning. Probably you already know about ARM templates. We can say they are the basic notation for deployment in Azure. But what happens when we need to deploy multiple items at once? Here are some options: Build everything in a single ARM template, what … Read more
Need to migrate your Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 before Microsoft retires the service? This post from Dennes Torres explains how to automate the migration.… Read more
Azure Cloudshell uses PowerShell 7.2.1. However, Powershell 7.2.2 is already available and we have also a PowerShell version 7.3.0 in preview. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could update the powershell version in cloudshell, instead of waiting for Microsoft? This would allow you to run scripts using the new features of the updated versions. Before … Read more
Mapping an Azure Storage Account file share on a local machine is a powerful feature. In this post, Dennes Torres explains how to do it and what to watch out for.… Read more
The main gist of this article is that if you are starting any project where you want to both teach a subject or benchmark algorithms, the cleaner the machine you start with, the less competition you have from other software skewing the results. The only thing I installed on my new computer was SSMS and … Read more
Azure Storage Policies are around for some time already, but they manage to stay unnoticed. This feature is very powerful and few people know about it. Probably you already know about Storage Keys and Shared Access Security. It’s important to highlight one limitation: Once we generate a SAS key, we can’t change or cancel it … Read more
This is going to be the last time I say it (well, at least on my blog). Last year sucked. Partly due to Covid as my wife was hit hard and still isn’t right after a year… honestly when I had it I was tired a little… not that that changed my opinion on what … Read more
I believe I’m not alone on this feeling: It seems like every time we use the Azure Portal some new feature appear. The features reproduce themselves faster than rabbits. Did you had this feeling before? Share your thoughts in the comments. This week, working with Azure, I found some new small features around and decided … Read more
Update on 01/03/2022: There are two small mistakes on the article below. A) On the UI, the only Tag value which accepts customization is Label. I believe the customization is possible through API, but I haven’t checked it. B) The filter and group by using the Label tag is possible. The Label only appears as … Read more
I wrote many blogs about policies in Azure. First, I started talking about How essential Policies are. After that, I included them in a blog about Azure SQL AD Only Authentication and finally about how to ensure Azure SQL is with Azure AD Only Authentication enabled. Using both, policies and management groups, we can manage … Read more
MFA and conditional access policies are powerful tools for our cloud security, but they are full of tricks. I don’t pretend to cover the basics here. You know you can create conditional access policies to request MFA authentication from the users. You also know the fact the default configuration (which you should avoid) will request … Read more
A silly mistake, a site recovery error and a troubleshooting case study, let’s check how it happened. I was demonstrating Site Recovery in a training. Site recovery is a slow task, so I make the demonstration among other explanations, put the demonstration in the middle of other subjects. This also doesn’t leave much room to … Read more
Microsoft has made it possible to integrate Azure Active Directory with Virtual Machines. In this post, Dennes Torres walks you through the steps to set it up. … Read more
Some time ago I wrote a blog about the just released feature to allow only Azure Authentication in Azure SQL Databases. On that blog, I explained not only about the feature, but how to use Azure Policies, a great feature for governance, to control which Azure SQL are correctly configured and which is not, … Read more
Dynamic data mask is a very interesting security feature allowing us to mask critical fields such as e-mail, phone number, credit card and so on. We can decide what users will be able to see the value of these features or not. This feature faced many flaws when it was released, but I believe it’s … Read more
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