SQL Azure

Timothy Smith

Getting Started with Subdocuments in Azure Cosmos DB

February 22, 2019 by

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.

Read more »
Timothy Smith

Applying Field Operators and Objects in Azure Cosmos DB

February 15, 2019 by

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.

Read more »
Timothy Smith

Updating and Querying Details in Azure Cosmos DB

February 12, 2019 by

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.

Timothy Smith

Getting Started with Azure Cosmos DB

February 11, 2019 by

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.

Esat Erkec

How to use JSON data in Azure Machine Learning

November 9, 2018 by

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.

Read more »
Prashanth Jayaram

Getting Started with Azure Cosmos DB and MongoDB API

November 7, 2018 by

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.

Read more »
Prashanth Jayaram

Graph database implementation with Azure Cosmos DB using the API

November 5, 2018 by

In my previous article, I’ve discussed a lot about the Graph database implementation with SQL Server 2017. In this case, we’ll see a walk-through of Graph API integration with Azure Cosmos DB.

Before we jump into the concepts though, let’s take a high-level overview of NoSQL databases. A NoSQL database is designed in such a way that no extra efforts are needed for the database to be distributed because NoSQL Database designed that way.

Read more »
Esat Erkec

How to integrate Power BI data alerts into Slack

August 31, 2018 by

There is a growing trend among professionals and entire companies to move away from email as a primary means of communication and are even adopting alternative technologies. One of the most popular of these is Slack. Slack is a new kind of messaging and communication platform between colleagues, team or community members that allows them to integrate a lot of services including Visual Studio Team Service, Jira and GitHub.

Read more »
Istvan Martinka

Dynamic Partitioning in Azure Analysis Services (tabular)

August 6, 2018 by

Objective

The real-life requirement

Disclaimer: I assume dear Reader, that you are more than familiar with the general concept of partitioning and star schema modeling. The intended audience is people who used to be called BI developers in the past (with a good amount of experience), but they have all sorts of different titles nowadays that I can’t keep up with… I won’t provide a full Visual Studio solution that you can download and just run without any changes or configuration, but I will give you code can be used after parameterizing according to your own environment.

Read more »
Marko Zivkovic

What is SQL Data Sync

June 1, 2018 by

SQL Data Sync is a service that allows synchronizing data across multiple Azure SQL databases and on-premises SQL Server databases.

In this article, a base concept of how the SQL Data Sync service works will be explained as well as what the requirements and limitations are when want to create data synchronization by using SQL Data Sync

Read more »
Esat Erkec

Integrating Azure SQL database alerts into Slack

April 27, 2018 by

Database administrators have a lot of tasks and responsibilities but perhaps the most challenging task is performance tuning. Because performance tuning issues can cause huge problems in the business area, database administrators have to monitor performance metrics and have to get immediate, if not sooner, notifications when the performance values cross an optimal state. Generally, this notification comes by e-mail.

Read more »
Istvan Martinka

How to connect and perform a SQL Server database restore from Azure BLOB storage

April 18, 2018 by

Having things in the cloud should make life simpler but I have experienced it’s not that straightforward. Once all access / configuration is sorted out then yes, of course! But in the meantime it can be tedious (even frustrating) and the end result is something that could have been achieved with a different method.

I think a significant chunk of what Azure offers is easier to do with the more conventional methods but that separates us from the advanced Azure features that a company would like to utilize in the shorter / longer term future. So there are reasons to spend some time / effort in getting things right up there.

In my case the task I needed to accomplish sounded simple enough:

  • get a SQL Server database backup (.bak file) from Azure blob storage
  • copy it to our own environment and restore it to a SQL Server instance on an Azure Windows VM
  • or skip the copy step and restore straight from blob storage
Read more »
Esat Erkec

How to develop a K-Means model on Azure Machine Learning Studio

January 30, 2018 by

In this article, we will discuss the k-means algorithm and how can we develop a k-means model on Azure Machine Learning Studio.

Machine learning is an area of ​​artificial intelligence that helps us develop relationships between data and predict the future. There are many secrets that are hidden in the data. To discover these secrets, we need Machine Learning algorithms. Machine learning plays the key role in leveraging existing data to exploit business opportunities.

Read more »
Esat Erkec

How to integrate SQL Server and Azure Machine Learning

January 11, 2018 by

Good, clean and reliable data is important for every company, because well-analyzed data will open new possibilities to success. When we look at successful companies, we see that they’ve analyzed customers, sales, and finance data very well. At this point, a game changer enters: machine learning.

Machine learning

Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence which analyzes data in order to predict future and discover hidden patterns. The output helps us make decisions. Machine learning is widely used in finance, healthcare and marketing.

Read more »
Daniel Calbimonte

How to use BULK INSERT to import data locally and in Azure

November 16, 2017 by

Introduction

BULK INSERT is a popular method to import data from a local file to SQL Server. This feature is supported by the moment in SQL Server on-premises.

However, there is a new feature that is supported only in SQL Server 2017 on-premises. This feature allows importing data from a file stored in an Azure storage account to SQL Server on-premises using BULK INSERT. This feature will be supported in Azure SQL versions in the future.

In this article, we will show two examples. The first example will show how to use the traditional BULK INSERT statement from a local CSV file to Azure and the second example will show how to import data from a CSV file stored in Azure to SQL Server on-premises.

Read more »