Azure, Microsoft's cloud, provides dozens of services to make cloud development fast without the need to worry about infrastructure such as hardware. In this article, Jakub Kaczmarek explains the benefits and challenges of creating a bot using the Microsoft Bot Framework found on Azure. He also walks you through creating a simple bot.… Read more
With Amazon RDS, it’s easy to have a SQL Server running in minutes. There are some limitations, though. Seth Delconte explains a workaround to overcome one of the limitations: the inability to restore a second copy of a database to recover missing data.… Read more
IT shops do not want to spend time and energy managing infrastructure and servers as was done in the past. They must conserve resources for the things that add value for the business. Today, it is challenging for companies to automate and configure their Azure infrastructure. In the first part of his new series, Nicolas Prigent introduces the basics about Azure and Windows PowerShell for DevOps and Sysadmin.… Read more
Azure Event Grid (in preview) is a new event routing service that works with Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions. It’s one more solution that enables developers to focus on business value, not on infrastructure. Christos Matskas explains how this new feature works and walks you through a simple example. … Read more
The key to efficient development is reusability. When developing scripts for administration, being able to restart a script where it left off is also important. Robert Cain shows you how to write functions in PowerShell that have these two qualities for administering Azure.… Read more
Choosing the right data platform is not an easy task. Warner Chaves compares the capabilities of the big three Database as a Service (DBaaS) offerings, Microsoft’s Cosmos DB, Google’s Cloud Spanner, and Amazon’s DynamoDB, to help you make the right choice for your application.… Read more
Can you imagine it? You are in a group of smart database people, and they are debating the finer points about AWS DMS, and you don't even know what the letters stand for. You just feel too shy to ask those basic questions that seem ridiculous once you're up to speed. Laerte Junior answers all the questions you need answers for when facing the prospect of getting familiar with Amazon's useful Database Migration Servic… Read more
This article pulls together the concepts from two previous articles to demonstrate a way to automate the “on-demand” creation and deletion of an HDInsight cluster. This not only serves as a demonstration of the power of automating Azure provisioning, but is a practical solution for the user who only occasionally requires the power of HDInsight for scalable computations.… Read more
Because Azure is designed from the ground-up to allow automated provisioning, It provides a number of interesting opportunities for use. With a .NET language such as C#, it is possible to create a very flexible 'on-demand' infrastructure in Azure, using Azure Resource Manager templates, that allows users to economically deploy the resources they need just for the interval of time that they are required, and then destroy them. … Read more
Azure App Service has got more versatile because it can now run Linux. Not only can you run Web App for Containers, and publish Docker containers to Azure, but there is built-in support for ASP.NET Core, Node.js, PHP and Ruby on Linux. This allows you to host microservicess on a fully-managed platform. Christos Matskas explains.… Read more
Although Azure Data Warehouse is part of the bright new jewellery of the Microsoft Data Platform, the old Data Warehouse rules still apply where data imports are concerned. When it comes to data import, it pays to choose the fastest import method first and prepare your data first to ensure that it is compatible with your choice. The subtlety is in the details, as Feodor explains.… Read more
There are a number of different ways that you can host SQL Server. RDS SQL Server, for example, uses SQL Server within AWS as a simple database service, much like a more versatile alternative to MySQL. Obviously, it is a compromise, in that you lose many of the extras beyond the database. Laerte Junior answers those questions about RDS that people seem to assume you know the answers to, but which you may be too shy to ask.… Read more
Your Agile developers want MongoDB, or a similar document database: your Ops people are concerned about security and backup, and Governance are muttering about transactionality and data transfer between systems. Do you restrict your developers from rapidly-evolving the data design for their domain or do you embrace the joys of NoSQL unconditionally? If you accept a polyglot database environment, where the NoSQL lambs coexist with the relational lions, how do you provide tools and common database concepts that everyone can use and understand?… Read more
Creating a feed for a data warehouse used to be a considerable task. Now, it just takes a few minutes to work through a series of screens that, in this example, create a pipeline that brings data from a remote FTP server, decompresses the data and imports the data in a structured format, ready for data analysis. The Copy Wizard for the Azure Data Factory is a great time-saver, as Feodor Georgiev explains.… Read more
If you need a way of deploying infrastructure-as-code to Azure, then Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates are the obvious way of doing it simply and repeatedly. They define the objects you want, their types, names and properties in a JSON file which can be understood by the ARM API. Ed Elliott takes the mystery out of a simple means of specifying your Azure environment, whether it is a VM with blockchain software, SQL Server or a Web App on Linux with PostgreSQL
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Azure Data Lake Store is an extendable store of Cloud data in Azure. You can move data to and from Azure Data Lake Store via Azure data Factory or Azure SQL Database and connect to a variety of data sources. You can script upload files from on-premise or local servers to Azure Data Lake Store using the Azure Data Lake Store .NET SDK. Ambily KK shows how easy it is to get started by setting up a script or App to move data to Azure Data Lake Store.… Read more
Azure Data Factory provides a radical new cloud-based way of collecting and preparing data in preparation for its storage and analysis. How do you get started with it to explore the possibilities it provides? Feodor Georgiev shows the practicalities of how to go about the task of preparing a pipeline for use, from preparing the Azure environment to downloading a file from a FTP to a blob storage in the Azure environment… Read more
It is surprising that so much can be identified by deduction from data. You may assume that you can safely distribute partially masked data for reporting, development or testing when the original data contains personal information. Without this sort of information, much medical or scientific research would be vastly more difficult. However, the more useful the data is, the easier it is to mount an inference attack on it to identify personal information. Phil Factor explains.… Read more
Microsoft (StreamInsight), and Azure Stream Analytics represent a very different model for processing data. They are concerned with processing complex event streams of data (CEPs) from such things as sensors to deduce significant patterns and apply filters. Joe Celko discusses the background to an intriguing technology of complex event processing to establish the difference between data at rest, and data on the move.… Read more
Although Azure is the obvious Cloud service to host SQL Server, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for SQL Server is a good choice when your organisation uses AWS. RDS deals with maintenance and monitoring, and supports the use of PowerShell to automate routine tasks. What if a script needs to be triggered by an unscheduled event? Even in this case, RDS can be configured to run scripts to react when something like a failover happens. Laerte Junior shows how easy it is to set up Lambda functions and some PowerShell scripts to automatically synchronise agent jobs after a failover.… Read more
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