I wrote many blogs about policies in Azure. I started talking about How essential Policies are, than including 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 standards across a … 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
I need to confess: I’m proud of the article Query Store and Parameterization Problems I wrote. Today it’s no news at all (although some people may not know the details about plan guides I included in the article) but I wrote it in 2017, based on SQL Server 2016, when the idea of identifying parameter sniffing … 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
Saying that I’m from the time of the MDAC would be to break the main rule of never reveal our age. However, who really remembers Microsoft Data Access Components – MDAC – today ? Microsoft had ODBC and it was good. Out of the blue came Borland with a thing called BDE that was way … Read more
Many years ago, in the company I was working for, one junior DBA started a reindex operation in a SQL Server Standard Edition on the most busy day of the month. Do I need to explain what happened next? It’s easy to use the imagination on this one. What’s the option to solve this? Online … Read more
When we include a data source inside a data flow it always requests a dataset. The dataset, in turn, requires you to point to a table. A dataset can’t be defined over a query, it needs an object on the linked service, which may be a table or view as you may notice on the … Read more
Azure is part of the Microsoft Global Network. Applications in the Azure environment can receive access from the entire world. This world-wide access creates a dilemma about the routing to the Azure services. We face two options: routing through Microsoft Global Network or through public internet. Initially only the Storage Accounts had a direct configuration … Read more
Resource groups and subscriptions sometimes are not enough to organize the content of our Azure Portal. I was preparing for a presentation and looking into a lot of resource groups, but during the presentation only a few of them should appear for me. How could I control this? The need is the mother of the … Read more
Recently a new feature appeared in Azure Portal, an ARM Template Visualizer, capable to show a graphic view of the resources inside an ARM template. The feature appears as a new button in screens where we are editing or downloading templates. These are some of the screens where you will see the new button: When … Read more
Infrastructure as code is evolving in large steps to improve the way we build and manage cloud infrastructure. ARM templates is the Azure way to code the infrastructure, besides the fact it’s evolving towards BICEP. Since January, a new feature to manage ARM templates is being tested and made available in Azure Portal: ARM Template … Read more
1 – Azure Hybrid Benefit Azure services related to servers and direct infrastructure reservation require software licenses, such as Windows Server and SQL Server. Microsoft offers what’s called Hybrid Benefit. When the software license is required, the service provisioning process asks if you would like to use the hybrid benefit. If you already have on … Read more
ViewBag, ViewData, and TempData all are Dictionary objects in ASP.NET MVC and these are used for data passing in various situations. The following are the situations where we can use TempData and other objects. Pass the data from Controller to View. Pass the data from an action to another action in Controller. Pass the data in … Read more
Visual Studio Code appeared years ago as a light option to the full Visual Studio Environment. Being light, there are some features that we don’t have or at least took some time to appear. C# XML Comments is one of them. If a code needs to be full of comments, it’s possible the code is … Read more
Many DBA skills transfer when moving to the cloud, but you'll have to make some adjustments in many cases. In this post, Dennes Torres explains one of the differences when setting up Extended Events sessions in Azure SQL Database.… Read more
Azure Cost Management is in constant evolution to help manage the cost of services in the cloud. Microsoft provides the Azure Cost Management Power BI App to manage cloud costs, but this app only works with Enterprise Agreement accounts. This was a considerable limitation, since many companies use the cloud using Customer Agreement instead of … Read more
You can use PowerShell’s Compare-Objects to do just that, but it’s not always useful enough for database objects. Phil Factor explains how his Diff-Objects works in this post.… Read more
Simple Talk Bloggers
Subscribe for more articles
Fortnightly newsletters help sharpen your skills and keep you ahead, with articles, ebooks and opinion to keep you informed.
Compliant Database DevOps
Standardize team-based development
Automate database deployments
Monitor performance and availability
Protect and preserve data
