Azure

I want to call attention to an upcoming change that I’m surprised I haven’t heard a lot more comments about. When you deploy an Azure VM, by default, they’ve always had the ability to connect outbound to the Internet.

That’s going to change.

Note the contents of this official notice: Default outbound access for VMs in Azure will be retired— transition to a new method of internet access.

The TLDR version of this, is that after the change date, when you deploy an Azure VM, it will not have outbound connectivity to the Internet.

2023-10-04

I was recently sent a copy of a new book by Ahilan Ponnusamy and Andreas Spanner, called Technology Operating Models for Cloud and Edge: Create your purpose-built distributed operating model for public, hybrid, multicloud, and edge.

It was interesting to read this book.

I spend more of my time on the Azure side of the fence than the AWS / RedHat side of things, so I have some pretty different opinions to the authors on many of the topics. I’ve have worked with multiple clouds, so what they were describing was familiar anyway.

2023-09-28

Microsoft Learn has a community content pilot running right now. They are looking to see how content from community members might provide different value to the content provided by their team members.

So, I decided that I should submit an article to see how it goes, and to find out how it works.

At present, it’s all hosted in a GitHub repository, and no surprise, is all written in Markdown.

2023-09-26

This is part 4 of a series on working with change data capture (CDC) in Azure SQL Database. This part discusses how to enable it and how to use it.

When I was reading the documentation for CDC in Azure SQL Database, I kept coming across a mention that it required at least an S3 service level objective (SLO), if you were using a DTU-based database.

I really hoped that wasn’t the case.

2023-09-23

I can’t tell you how many times lately, that I’ve seen people writing about service principles when they really mean service principals. These are entirely different concepts!

I did a certification exam the other day, and it was asking about service principles. I was left wondering how many people had reviewed that before it was released.

But what’s worse, is when people bake the wrong one into code libraries that others need to use. I was reading some content from Microsoft Learn: Quickstart: Manage data with Azure Cosmos DB Spark 3 OLTP Connector for API for NoSQL and I saw this code example:

2023-08-11

This is part 3 of a series on working with change data capture (CDC) in Azure SQL Database. This part discusses how to enable it and how to use it.

To show how this works, I have created an Azure SQL Database called CDCTest. I created it as a DTU-based database with a service level objective (SLO) of S3. I’ll discuss more about the licensing implications of CDC in part 4.

2023-06-02

Microsoft has had a strong lead in BI and analytics for a long time now. The introduction of the tabular data models in 2012 was a watershed moment.

Today, they have announced a private preview of Microsoft Fabric. It’s a bigger deal than the tabular model was, and will set the direction of BI tooling for a long time to come.

The opposition was already struggling to keep up, and in fact, hadn’t managed to do so. Microsoft Fabric will up the ante much, much higher than where we already were.

2023-05-24

I recently noticed a blog post from Jay Gordon that was calling out interesting content from Blaize Stewart on antipatterns for development with Azure Cosmos DB.

I thought this would be a perfect topic for one of our Cosmos Down Under podcasts and Blaize agreed to take part.

So much content talks about what to do with a product, and even though everyone knows there are things you shouldn’t do, very little content talks about these antipatterns. It was great to speak to Blaize about it, and to get his updated thoughts.

2023-05-17

In the part 1 of this series, I discussed the positioning of Change Data Capture. In part 2, I want to cover how it works.

Log Reading

There are many ways that you can output details of changes that occur in data within SQL Server. Many of those methods require actions to occur at the time the data change is made. This can be problematic.

The first problem with this, is the performance impact on the application that’s making the change. If I update a row in a table and there is part of the process that writes details of that change to some type of audit or tracking log, I’ve now increased the work that needs to happen in the context of the application that’s making the change. Generally what this means, is that I’ve slowed the application down by at least doubling the work that needs to be performed. That might not be well-received.

2023-03-06

I often need to capture the changes from one database into another. The most common reason is that I’m wanting to bring changes from a transactional system across into a data warehouse that’s part of a BI setup.

So which technology is best to use for this?

That’s not a trivial question to answer but here are some thoughts:

Replication?

Unfortunately, this one’s not available for Azure SQL DB as yet. Azure SQL DB can be a subscriber in Transactional Replication. We often use it this way. If we have an on-premises SQL Server, one of our favourite ways to get data into the cloud is by using Transactional Replication. (If you need to get your head around Replication with SQL Server, just head to our course here).

2023-02-26