*Update at the end 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 … 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
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
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