SQL Azure

Situations When We May Want Higher Azure Costs

June 17, 2019 by Timothy Smith

We’ve looked at methods to reduce costs within Azure. We may experience situations where a slight increase in Azure costs will benefit us to help protect our resources and customers when it involves security or other critical updates. When we consider these situations, we must keep up-to-date with the latest patches, updates to development libraries, as well as the possible effects of these updates to our existing code. Likewise, related to resource usage, a resource may be unused or seldom used by a percent of our customers that we keep when we’re ready to switch all our customers while we make the appropriate upgrades to our resources to help with costs. We’ll look at some techniques that we can use to manage the challenge of critical updates while also keeping costs down, or putting costs into a context about what may be more expensive.

Vulnerability Assessment and Advanced Threat Protection in Azure SQL Database

June 17, 2019 by Gauri Mahajan

In today’s time where data breaches are highly expected to happen, there is a high need to ensure sensitive data in the Azure SQL databases is secured and which is why data security implementation is gaining momentum across each community. We covered one of the features of Advanced Data Security here in Advanced Data Security in Azure SQL Database – Data Discovery & Classification. Let’s dive further into the other two features that Azure SQL offers with this capability in this article.

Advanced Data Security in Azure SQL Database – Data Discovery & Classification

June 17, 2019 by Gauri Mahajan

Azure SQL supports in building and managing wide range of SQL databases, tools, frameworks etc. on the cloud. Organizations are drifting towards Azure SQL because of its obvious advantages over on-premises SQL Server and are generating, exchanging and storing data at an exponential rate on Azure. It becomes essential to safeguard, monitor our sensitive data and get alerts on anomalous activities else companies may come under fire for letting data leak and hacked.

Finding Unused Resources Impacting Azure Costs

June 10, 2019 by Timothy Smith

To reduce Azure costs on unused and unnecessary resources, we should design with prevention in mind – considering whether we want to commit to reserved use or test with a pay-as-we-go model. We may experience situations where we already have many resources, but are unsure of their use – are these consistently used, sometimes used, never used? Before we can answer whether an unused resource (or what appears to be an unused resource) is unnecessary, we have to determine whether it’s used. In this tip, we’ll look at this challenge.

Handling Unused and Unnecessary Resources Impacting Azure Costs

June 5, 2019 by Timothy Smith

Two of the more challenging causes of an increase in Azure costs are unused and unnecessary resources. Unused and unnecessary resources may not always be the same, even though they can overlap. If we know the difference between these resource categories or when these resources categories overlap then we will see improvements in preventing these from adding to our costs. In addition, when we think about unused resources, we should consider options that we have with Azure to optimize for these, as an unused resource may still be necessary sometimes. In this tip, we’ll look at these topics to assist us with reducing our Azure use.

Tracking Azure Costs with Cost Management

June 3, 2019 by Timothy Smith

The Azure Portal offers the free tool Cost Management that we can use for managing Azure costs. As we’ll see, we can use this tool to organize how we manage our spending along with setting limits for thresholds to alert the appropriate members. While this tool can be useful for our organization, it has the potential to cause noise or disruptions, so we still want to review how we use it within our organization for managing the spending of our teams.

Creating Containers with PowerShell For Azure Cosmos DB

May 30, 2019 by Timothy Smith

In many situations, we will develop, test or prove new concepts by horizontally scaling new SQL API containers in Azure Cosmos DB over possibly using existing containers. As we’ve seen in previous tips, we can create and remove Cosmos database accounts and databases by using the Azure Portal or PowerShell’s Az module along with making some updates to the configuration, such as the RUs for performance reasons. Similarly, we can create and remove a container through the Azure Portal along with creating and removing the container with PowerShell’s Az module.

Increasing or Decreasing Scale for Azure Cosmos DB

May 28, 2019 by Timothy Smith

Now that we can create and remove an Azure Cosmos DB and databases that we can use for automation purposes, along with obtaining some information about these accounts, we’ll look at making some changes to these accounts for contexts related to performance. It’s possible that our unit and security testing or development with proof-of-concepts may face performance problems where we need to upgrade the settings of our database account. In this tip, we’ll be working with the SQL API database layer in a Cosmos database account by building on our get, create and remove automation to update its performance.

Creating and Removing Databases with PowerShell In Azure Cosmos DB

May 27, 2019 by Timothy Smith

Our testing or development may call for dynamic creation on the database level for Azure Cosmos DB rather than the account level. As we’ve seen with dynamically working with a Cosmos database account using PowerShell, we can create, remove, and obtain properties of the account. Identically, we can do this on the database level as well and we may use this in testing if we need the same Cosmos database account for other testing purposes. Development situations may also involve use cases where we want to test a concept and dynamically create a database within our Cosmos database account. In this tip, we’ll look at working with our Azure Cosmos database account on the database object level where we do nothing to manipulate the account itself, only add databases to the account once it’s been setup.

Getting and Updating Connection Information for Azure Cosmos DB

May 24, 2019 by Timothy Smith

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.

Creating and Removing Azure Cosmos DBs with PowerShell

May 21, 2019 by Timothy Smith

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.

Extract Azure Costs Using PowerShell

May 20, 2019 by Timothy Smith

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.

User Security and Risks to Azure Costs

May 16, 2019 by Timothy Smith

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.

Controlling Azure Costs Using Scaling and Tags

May 13, 2019 by Timothy Smith

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.

Azure Costs Tracking with Security and Design Considerations

April 30, 2019 by Timothy Smith

Azure costs can quickly mount, without careful supervision and management. This article will detail cost mitigation strategies using security and design

SQL Code Snippets in Azure Data Studio

April 16, 2019 by Rajendra Gupta

This article will fully cover the code snippet SQL developer productivity feature in Azure Data Studio including a list of available snippets and examples of how to create custom code snippets

Provisioning SQL Server 2019 Azure Container Instance using PowerShell

March 28, 2019 by Prashanth Jayaram

This guide is all about provisioning SQL Server 2019 using Azure Container Instance (ACI), including the installation and configuration. In this article, we talk about the Azure Container Instance (ACI), the Azure PowerShell module, installation and configuration of SQL Server using the Azure PowerShell module, and automation of installation and deployment using templates.

SQL Server database migration to Azure SQL Database using SQL Server Transactional Replication

March 22, 2019 by Prashanth Jayaram

In this guide, we’ll discuss more about migrating a SQL Server database to Azure SQL Database using SQL Server Transactional Replication.

Getting Started with Subdocuments in Azure Cosmos DB

February 22, 2019 by Timothy Smith

As we’ve worked with Azure Cosmos DB, we’ve seen that we can store data within fields and the fields of each document don’t always have to match – though we still want some organization for querying. The fields and values storage becomes useful when working with object-oriented languages as these fields can be keys that we use with values that we extract as properties. For an example, the below PowerShell line creates a JSON document in an object and we can see that we can extract the values of these keys in the JSON object.

Applying Field Operators and Objects in Azure Cosmos DB

February 15, 2019 by Timothy Smith

Since we will sometimes require removing documents in Azure Cosmos DB, we’ll want to be able to specify the documents for removal. In some cases, this will be as simple as specifying a field for removal, such as removing one type of workout in our temporary database we’ve created. In other delete situations, we’ll want to remove if the value of the field isn’t what we expect – such as greater than what we want. This applies to updates as well – we may want to drill into a specific value range for an update. In this tip, we’ll look at using operators with strings, numeric types and dates.

Updating and Querying Details in Azure Cosmos DB

February 12, 2019 by Timothy Smith

In the first part of this series Getting Started with Azure Cosmos DB, we looked at using Azure Cosmos DB for saving an individual’s fitness routine and why this database structure is better for this data than a SQL database while also showing that we still have to organize our structure like a file system organizes files. In this part of our series, we’ll begin looking at the terminology translation between NoSQL and SQL along with running updates for our documents and queries with filters that return some fields in our document, but not other fields.

Getting Started with Azure Cosmos DB

February 11, 2019 by Timothy Smith

In the past two years, we’ve seen an explosion in growth with document-oriented databases like Azure Cosmos DB. MongoDB – one of the major document databases – went live on the Nasdaq and attracted some attention in the past year as well. While more developers are using the document structure for some appropriate data models, less than 10 years ago, some in the industry were predicting that document databases were unnecessary and wouldn’t last because all data could be flattened to fit the SQL model. I took the opposite approach, being an early adopter of MongoDB along with continuing to use SQL databases as I saw opportunities in both SQL and NoSQL for various data structures. While some data do fit the SQL model and SQL will continue to exist, some data are best for document databases, like Azure Cosmos DB. In this series, we’ll be looking at the why and how of document databases.

Use of Key Performance Indicators in Power BI

December 18, 2018 by Esat Erkec

In this article, we will learn Key Performance Indicators usage in Power BI and solve a business case problem through Power BI.

How to use JSON data in Azure Machine Learning

November 9, 2018 by Esat Erkec

Azure Machine Learning (also known as Azure ML) is cloud-based machine learning solution of Microsoft. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning is a fully-managed cloud-based service that provides the ability to create and train predictive analytic solutions. Another advantage of Azure ML is that you can access and easily make changes anywhere in machine learning models with help of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio.

Getting Started with Azure Cosmos DB and MongoDB API

November 7, 2018 by Prashanth Jayaram

In the previous article on Azure Cosmos DB, we reviewed NoSQL concepts and how to integrate with the Microsoft Azure platform-as-a-service model using the API. After working as a database engineer for over a decade, I feel that this technology is the future for many organizations for various reasons. I had that in mind as I wrote this article which will provide basic information and help you to get started with MongoDB API integration. The MongoDB API works with BSON documents. BSON is MongoDB’s binary-encoded-version of JSON, and it extends the JSON model with additional language feature support. It’s a great effort from Microsoft to build the enterprise solutions which provide flexibility in manage distributed data along with scalable option.