Tag Archives: Azure

Azure Advisor – for Azure Data Platform

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Wouldn’t it be nice if we could access one main dashboard / report that pulls in information from many tools such as security centre, SQL advisor and cost management tools? Well you can, thus giving you a focal point to implement best practices, called Azure Advisor. This is not specifically for Azure SQL Database, you can leverage this for most resources within Azure.  Later in this blog post you see that I will use it as a focal point for my database infrastructure in Azure.

In the Azure portal under services look for “advisor”

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Azure SQL Best Practices?

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A way to enforce good practice and standards is by Azure Policy. As stated by Microsoft “Azure Policy is a service in Azure that you use to create, assign, and manage policies. These policies enforce different rules and effects over your resources, so those resources stay compliant with your corporate standards and service level agreements”.  Pretty important stuff if you ask me.

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Backup Techniques for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines

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In the previous blog post I did a quick overview building a SQL VM (imaged) in Azure. It is now time to clarify some backup techniques because it can get confusing.

At a high level there are 3 techniques.

  • Automated backup.
  • Azure backup for SQL VM (that’s what MS call it).
  • Manual backup, for example backup to URL.

I prefer not setting up manual backups to storage accounts, I have done it, I just find it painful to  setup/support/fix. So my choice would be automated backup vs “Azure backup” for SQL VM. What’s the difference?

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SQL Server Virtual Machines in Azure

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Let’s create a virtual machine in Azure that has an imaged copy of SQL Server on it. I want to do this because down the line I want to show how you can setup automated backups to a storage account based on an IaaS extension, when I do that I will most likely talk about the different backup options because there are many.

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Azure Storage Accounts – Open to the Internet?

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Let’s get straight to the point. From official documentation it states that “To secure your storage account, you should first configure a rule to deny access to traffic from all networks (including internet traffic) by default. Then, you should configure rules that grant access to traffic from specific vnets. This configuration enables you to build a secure network boundary for your applications”.

Navigate to your storage account, what is the default setting? It is shown below.

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