Azure SQL Database – Read Only Endpoints

One of the main benefits of configuring active geo-replication for Azure SQL Database is leveraging the read-only endpoint, a good technique to split away read only activity from OLTP based workloads. This means that there is no reason why you cannot point users to these databases via tools such as Power BI as highlighted below.

diagram

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Azure SQL – Advanced Data Security [video]

A quick 2 minute overview video (from me) about ADS – Advanced Data Security. The unified package from Microsoft providing the ability to discover / classifying sensitive data, mitigate potential database vulnerabilities, and detect anomalous activities. Enjoy.

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SQL Server Stretch DB to Azure

Since SQL Server 2016 we could leverage Microsoft Azure to dynamically move “cold” portions of data away from on-premises storage for longer retention time periods. Whilst in theory being a great idea the cost was a blocker for some and with a cumbersome setup process. SQL Server 2019 addresses this by making the costs of storing the data in the cloud more competitive and making the setup more streamlined with the use of the Data Migration Assistant (DMA) tool and SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio).

Note: DMA tool replaces the older Upgrade Advisor tool. To install DMA please see the following link https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/dma/dma-overview?view=sql-server-ver15.

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Azure SQL Database Networking

Have you realised the changes Microsoft have made to the firewall and networking section of Azure SQL Database? I found this quite stealthy and took me by surprise. I did encounter an edge case scenario where it lead to issues once I made some tweaks but that was a rare thing.

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Azure Databricks to Azure SQL DB

Recently I got to a stage where I leveraged Databricks to the best of my ability to join couple of CSV files together, play around some aggregations and then output it back to a different mount point ( based on Azure Storage) as a parquet file, I decided that I actually wanted to move this data into Azure SQL DB, which you may want to do one day.

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SQL Server 2019 Linux On Azure

It was just a matter of time until I started combining my cloud experience with “different” flavours of SQL Server. I haven’t used Linux since my university days (Oracle – errgh) but recently some Friends of mine ( using LAMP stack ) asked me couple of questions about SQL Server Linux.

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