Time to shift gears away from the world of relational databases whether that is in the cloud, on-prem, Linux-based, containers or even sitting within Kubernetes. Everyone has heard of Synapse. They face stiff competition from the likes of Snowflake. Snowflake does not really have this concept of Control and compute nodes like within the Microsoft world to build out this MPP based architecture.
Azure CLI is really handy for all sorts of tasks. When I build solutions, POCs and environments and I want to tear down the resources I like to use Azure CLI over the Portal. Below will show you the commands I use.
Storage Accounts are pretty much integrated into so many different designs in Azure, whether you are using Azure Synapse, 3rd party product like Snowflake, or Event Streaming designs – we need it.
I really like scale sets. It lets you create and manage up to 1000 load balanced VMs per availability zone using windows or Linux images. (We can have flexible or uniforms modes for orchestration which dictates if you go down the homogenous VM route or a mix, where a mix is the flexible option.
There are many different family groups for Azure VMs each with its own purpose. Below is a summary of what can be selected. This is important because for example if you are running complex OLTP database servers then very likely you will go for Memory optimised machines, right? We know SQL server loves RAM. Any ways here is the list:
Lets write about Microsoft Azure, specially the area of high availability when it comes to virtual machines.
A post close to my heart, Azure SQL Managed Instance, I have blogged about this many times but I feel I should be sharing more details about this. One important topic – Maintenance windows.
I mentioned before that you could use the idea of data persistency to rebuild your data from total failure. There are two types. RDB and AOF.
RDB – persists a snapshot of your cache in a binary format. The snapshot is saved in an Azure Storage account. AOF – saves every write operation to a log. The log is saved at least once per second into an Azure Storage account.
This is quite an in-depth topic area and I suggest further reading to determine which one suits you: https://redis.io/topics/persistence#aof-disadvantages
To set this up you will see data persistence section within your Redis Cache
If you navigate to the overview section of your MySQL server you will see a notification area, here you will find security section. It’s basically an area to provide some hints / tips if things have not been configured such as if you have not enabled query store it may well suggest it. For this blog it is suggesting I consider a feature called Microsoft Defender.
The query store, sounds familiar? The idea of the black box sitting within the database server watching what is going on within the environment. This is available within MySQL, maybe not as feature rich as SQL Server but still useful.
You will find this option under the Query performance insight section of your MySQL server.
All About Data 