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
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
Policies in Azure are like Wally. They are there, but not obvious to find, hidden in the middle of many services, waiting for someone recognize their importance. Why do we need Policies Billing The billing control in Azure has by itself many different reasons to enforce policies. You, with your single Azure subscription, may think … Read more
Log Analytics is a basic tool for the entire Azure environment, I wrote about it before. The possibility to access log analytics data from a tool for analysis, such as Power BI, only increases its importance. There are some options to make this access and we expect these options to improve very soon. Using Notebooks … Read more
Azure technologies evolve so fast sometimes we lose track of what’s happening. One day, a simple technology is created, on the next day, it becomes something huge, in a blink of an eye. I’m not even sure if my recollection of the story will be correct. The launch of the GA version of Static Web … Read more
Azure Monitor and Log Analytics are a very important part of Azure infrastructure. In my opinion, the adoption of these tools should start before a company starts its migration to azure. Using these tools over on premises servers can generate a performance baseline to be used when migrating the servers, ensuring the environment will be … Read more
Azure Functions are a great development tool, allowing us to create serverless software. However, one detail was bothering me when I create a function: The HTTP Trigger receives a HTTPRequest object and we need to extract the parameters from the request. This becomes kind of a low-level code mixed with our business code. It’s like going … Read more
Azure SQL has a close relationship with Azure Storage. Features like Polybase, backups, extended events and more make use of Azure Storage. On Azure SQL Database, probably the most common use is Extended Events. When we create a file target, we need to point to the Azure Storage URL where the file will be stored. … Read more
Data Lakes are becoming more usual every day and the need for tools to query them also increases. While writing about querying a data lake using Synapse, I stumbled upon a Power BI feature I didn’t know was there. When reading from a data lake, each folder is like a table. We store in the … Read more
You may have noticed the export feature on Azure resource groups don’t like too much the Data Factory. We can’t completely export a Data Factory as an ARM template, it fails. Probably you know you don’t need to care about this too much. You can link the data factory with a github repo and get … Read more
One great result from PASS Summit, especially when we are close to a new SQL Server release, is to identify important technologies to study on the following year. PASS Summit 2018 was great, with sessions about many new technologies giving us very good guidance on where to focus our study for the new year. Let’s … Read more
What's the best way of providing self-service business intelligence (BI) to data that is held in on-premise SQL Server? Not, it seems, Power BI 2.0 the hosted cloud service, but Power BI 2.0 Desktop. If moving your database to Azure isn't an option, Power BI 2.0 desktop could still bring smiles to the faces of your BI hotshots.… Read more
SQL-based distributed Cloud Relational databases aren't new, but Amazon's Aurora offers an alternative to SQL Azure, and, being MySQL-compatible, provides the obvious route to the cloud for hosted LAMP web applications. Is this of interest to the rest of us? Rob Sheldon investigates.… Read more
Boxstarter is an open-source application that enables you to do the unattended install of everything required to turn bare metal, Azure VM or Hyper-V VM into a working Windows Server. It is built on top of Chocolatey, Nuget, and PowerShell to make the repeated installation of windows-based machines into an automated error-free process. Matt Wrock, Boxstarter's creator, explains how to use it.… Read more
There is no better way of understanding new data processing, retrieval, analysis or visualising techniques than actually trying things out. In order to do this, it is best to use a server that acts as data science lab, with all the basic tools and sample data in place. Buck Woody discusses his system, and the configuration he chose.… Read more
One of my main annoyances when dealing with SQL Azure is of course the occasional connection problems that communicating to a cloud database entails. If you’re used to programming against a locally hosted SQL Server box this can be quite a change and annoying like you wouldn’t believe. So after hitting the problem again in … Read more
