Sifiso W. Ndlovu
Choose the Power BI Dashboard you want to add

Using Power BI Free License to Embed Power BI into Dynamics 365

May 24, 2019 by

Whilst Power BI continues to be the leading data visualisation tool in Gartner’s BI quadrant, Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (formerly Dynamics CRM) remains one of popular business platforms for driving sales and facilitating customer communications. Thus, an integration of Power BI into Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement ensures that you get to explore your Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement data via a powerful and rich data visualisation tool. However, as indicated in Figure 1, Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement plans often come with a Power BI free license thereby limiting the type of Power BI features available to you. In this article, we look at how you can get the best out of your Power BI free license for the purposes of embedding Power BI artefacts into Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement. Going forward, any references to Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement plan in this article will be shortened to Dynamics 365.

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Timothy Smith
We can regenerate keys in the Azure Portal for our Azure Cosmos DB

Getting and Updating Connection Information for Azure Cosmos DB

May 24, 2019 by

After we set up our Azure Cosmos DB, we may want to get, add to, or update existing properties. We may use some of the get functionality that PowerShell provides to dynamically save values to encrypted configuration files or tables that we use for application purposes and this functionality could be added to the creation of the Cosmos database account, or a separate step in addition to the creation. In secure contexts, this ensures security without the properties after passing through human eyes since they are saved directly to an encrypted location. In the same manner, we may want to regenerate the keys for the account and save the connection strings with the new keys.

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Esat Erkec
SQL unit testing - tSQLt framework tsqlt.ExpectException result image

SQL Unit Testing: Working with exceptions

May 21, 2019 by

With this article, we will complete our journey with SQL Unit Testing. But first, let’s remember the main theme of the SQL Unit Testing again briefly. With the help of the SQL Unit Testing, we can detect and find out the flaws and bugs in database projects. This reduces the possible loss of time and money and reputation during the use of the product. However, it should be kept in mind that no matter how many tests are carried out, there will still be some bugs in the project, but SQL unit tests provide a greater degree of confidence. The fact that there are no bugs or flaws in the application at that time does not mean that the application is perfect. We cannot test all combinations and probabilities of the database objects. That is why in real life, considering certain parameters (risk, priority, etc.) we must ensure that a “reasonably sufficient” test is done.

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Timothy Smith
The options we see when we select the download template for automation

Creating and Removing Azure Cosmos DBs with PowerShell

May 21, 2019 by

When managing Azure Cosmos DB, we can use the Azure portal and create resources through the interface or use the command line in the portal and create resources. PowerShell also supports some functionality for creating and managing these resources, which can help development teams automate the creation of these databases for quick creations, unit and security tests, removals if the resources aren’t required following the tests. We can also use these scripts for creating templates that we may use in multi-scaling creations (like databases in a group designed for horizontal scale). Generally, in one-off situations, the Azure Portal will suffice for deployments if there is a cost to develop automation that is not required. In this tip, we’ll look at the process of creating a blank and removing the same Azure Cosmos DB.

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Timothy Smith
By querying Azure cost information, we can share with development and improve to reduce costs

Extract Azure Costs Using PowerShell

May 20, 2019 by

With strong organization and design for our development teams, cloud infrastructure and security considerations, we’ll now extract Azure cost information that we can share with our organization. In addition, we will see that we can retain this information if needed to track growth (or reduction) in costs. This step is important as it will allow our teams to have an insight into their development and it will also be another audit we can use on the security side to catch unusual growth (or significant reductions) in resource costs that may be the result of an attacker. Our ultimate goal with tracking these costs and sharing them with teams is to improve our development and possibly re-organize it as needed, giving us the ability to further reduce our spending.

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Timothy Smith
Compare auditing Azure costs using self-auditng on the same App Service versus an independent server auditing

User Security and Risks to Azure Costs

May 16, 2019 by

We’ve looked at both the organization and development side of managing Azure costs. One risk we have is attackers who compromise an account and mis-scale resources (such as scaling up), driving up our costs. Another scenario is attackers scaling resources too low that affects client’s ability to do their work (performance problems) – a separate risk that may result in lower costs on the cloud side, but higher costs against our reputation. A third risk is reconnaissance of our Azure use: this allows the attackers to get information about our design and later make a wide range of attacks that will appear as normal to us – in this case, Azure costs may be only one of the impacts with other impacts being as severe.

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Ranga Babu
Direct recursive triggers in SQL Server

Triggers in SQL Server

May 15, 2019 by

In this article, we will review triggers in SQL Server, different types of trigger events, trigger order and NOT FOR REPLICATION in triggers. A trigger is a database object that runs automatically when an event occurs. There are three different types of events.

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Ahmad Yaseen
SQL Server database auditing - ApexSQl Audit installation Wizard

Perform a SQL Server Audit using ApexSQL Audit

May 15, 2019 by

This is the last article, but not least, in the SQL Server Audit series. In this series (see TOC at the bottom), we explained deeply the concept of the SQL Server Audit, why it becomes mandatory for each company to have a SQL Server Audit solution to track and log the different types of events at both the SQL Server instance and database levels. We also went through and compare the different methods that can be used to audit the SQL Server instances and databases.

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Ahmad Yaseen
SQL Server audit - New Temporal Table Creation

Performing a SQL Server Audit using System-Versioned Temporal Tables

May 14, 2019 by

In previous articles of this SQL Server Audit series (see the TOC at the bottom), we discussed the main concept and real-life needs for having a SQL Server Audit solution. After that, we went through the different methods that can be used to audit the SQL Server instances and databases. In this article, we will show how to take advantages of the System-versioned Temporal Tables feature to audit database table DML changes.

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Timothy Smith
We can also add tags without scripts by selecting the tag option under the Azure asset.

Controlling Azure Costs Using Scaling and Tags

May 13, 2019 by

Depending on our design and security, we can create functions or use built-in tools to control our Azure costs. In some contexts, we may look at the overall cost of what tools we’re using, which the Azure portal conveniently shows. Applying what we’ve looked at on the organization and development level, we can organize resources on their design (or ad hoc, as we’ll see) along with creating scripts that control our scale for situations where we may want higher or lower scale. We’ll look at both of these scenarios and how they can help us in both organization and development contexts.

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