Over half of my life ago, I was looking for a job. I had written a bunch of triggers and stored procedures at my first job, but I was relatively green. I had just (barely) gotten my degree in Computer Science, and was looking to get out of Cleveland, TN. I checked around and found … Read more
The app services in the title can be function apps, web apps or more. We can deploy the app services on the native app service environment provided by Microsoft or using containers. What’s the different between using the native environment or using containers? The differences aren’t many and it’s not easy to identify when it’s … Read more
The Auto-Shutdown policy is another important policy to ensure our virtual machines don’t expend more than what we planned for them. If we have a time window to use the virtual machines, the auto-shutdown policy can deactivate them at the right time. We need to discover the deep internal details about the auto-shutdown configuration before … Read more
There are many new features in SQL Server 2022. In relation to T-SQL querying, there are a few as well and they usually are left for last in face of many other new optimization features. Sample scenario These samples are built on the AdventureWorksDW2019 database installed in a SQL Server 2022 CTP 2. Date_Bucket Let’s … Read more
Solution Summary cards are the name I have given to simple 1-page documents we provide to developers to get up-to-speed on a particular solution. The primary use-case for these cards is to provide better on-boarding for new team members. An additional benefit is that crafting these short summaries forces people to review how your teams … Read more
Imagine that while developing or testing a SQL Server database, you get an error message mentioning a database object, and you scratch your head, and mutter ‘by the bones of the saints, what is that?’. If it is a small database, then you can glance, maybe, at the browser pane. Once it gets to any … Read more
I wrote before about enforcing Azure SQL AD Authentication using Azure Policies in two different ways. First, only auditing if the Azure SQL is using AD Authentication or not. Later, automatically enabling the AD Authentication on Azure SQL Servers where this authentication is not enabled. What about if we could create one single policy definition … Read more
One of the most essential parts of producing a great technical article, blog, or even a book, (referred to from now on generally as a work) is having someone who can check your writing and make sure it is right. You can do a mediocre job with grammar, punctuation, etc. and still produce technical resources … Read more
In Power BI, when importing data with Power Query, one basic performance concept is the use of native queries. The transformations will perform better if they can be converted to a native query, especially a single native query for all transformations. However, this is just a starting point for the optimizations. Sometimes, native queries for … Read more
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
*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