The Bit Bucket

If you have followed any of the Azure website forums, you’d realize that having SSL available was one of the highest rated requests. That’s hardly surprising given the number of clients that want to use these sites for eCommerce work.

So it’s really good to see that Scott Guthrie and the team have been listening and that SSL is now available. To see the details, click on the “SSL” button in the “Learn More” area of the Azure pricing page. An FAQ is also provided.

2013-06-03

Yesterday I was at a site where they decided to change the service account for the SQL Server services on a set of systems. After changing the service accounts, SQL Server restarted just fine on all machines except one.

I had used the SQL Server Configuration Manager to make the changes (important to not just use the Services applet in Administrative Tools) but I got the typical error telling me that the service wouldn’t start in a timely fashion. The server was running SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2.

2013-05-30

I was so glad to hear today that Azure is expanding to Australia. This helps with two remaining areas of concern that I’ve heard from a variety of customers:

• Compliance and data sovereignty (not wanting to store data outside Australia)
• Latency (previously high latency even to our nearest external data centres)

With both these concerns now disappearing, it’s time for more Australian customers to get involved with Azure if they’ve been resisting so far. 

2013-05-21

Fellow MVP Alessandro Cardoso sent me information today about a private cloud and virtualisation event that’s running later this month.

It’s being offered in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne.

2013-05-17

Hi Folks,

On Thursday night, I got to record a podcast with Reza Rad. I was interested to speak to Reza after reading his SQL Server 2012 Integration Services Cookbook.

In the show, we discuss SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) extensibility and some aspects of performance tuning for SSIS.

You’ll find the show here: SQL Down Under Podcast

Enjoy!

2013-05-13

I’m really impressed by the rate that the Azure team is making and releasing enhancements. Scott Guthrie posted about these again recently.

The following items in the announcement were ones that I think can be useful to those with an interest in SQL Server:

* General availability of Azure VMs. While we’ve had SQL Database and SQL Reporting available as services in Azure, we don’t have the other parts of the database platform. With Azure VMs, you can spin up a VM to run SQL Server.

2013-04-19

It’s great to see the constant roll-out of capabilities across the Azure platform.

One in particular that many have been waiting for is Active Directory. Scott Guthrie posted today that it’s now available for production use. This is particularly significant and also enables options for on-premises directory sync and federation. If you have been using Office365, you have already been using Azure AD.

Scott also mentioned that they are about to open a preview of a link from OAuth 2 (or OpenID) to Azure AD. That will enable you to use alternate credentials (such as Twitter credentials) to authenticate against Azure AD.

2013-04-09

I posted the other day about a hotfix that’s needed after you apply SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU3, to still be able to open or edit SSIS projects or database maintenance plans in SSDT.

However, I found that after I applied CU3 and the hotfix, that all my stored credential details for SQL Servers was gone. That was particularly nasty for all my Azure-related logons. I had to set them up again.

2013-04-09

One of the common objections that comes up when talking to people about storing their data in Azure, is that “we are not allowed to do it”. In so many cases, that simply isn’t true, or it’s true for a small part of the overall data. In other cases, it’s a case of no-one wanting to be seen to be the first in their industry to do so, for some perceived liability reasons. Again, most of these are unfounded.

2013-04-08

Cumulative Update 3 for SP1 for SQL Server 2012 caused a number of problems with SSIS packages. This also applies to database maintenance plans as they are also SSIS packages.

After applying the update, you could get this error when opening an SSIS package:

The type initializer for ‘Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Design.SharedIcons’ threw an exception.
Value of ’null’ is not valid for ‘stream’. (System.Drawing)

If you edit a maintenance plan, you could get this error:

2013-04-06