Thank you to everyone who participated in T-SQL Tuesday #091 which was on databases and DevOps. As I anticipated, this brought out quite a bit of variety on the posts. This is because DevOps is still... not quite cooked...(?) in many peoples minds. I think with the range of posts we saw here, it'll be a lot more clear to those who are just getting an introduction to it. Here are the posts (in no particular order) and a few comments on each: Databases and DevOps: Rob Farley - I like Rob's approach to this intro to DevOps. He's a consultant. It'd sure be nice if you had the protections that DevOps offers in front of your systems before he starts recommending changes. What Playing at Minecraft has Taught Me…
I'm still learning about Azure SQL Data Warehouse (ADW, cause I'm lazy). ADW is a deceptively deep topic. Initially you think that it's just SQL Server, what's the big deal. Then you start to understand the underlying architecture and things get complicated. Then you begin to understand the implications of the architecture and things get down right arcane. However, I'd like to talk about some relatively easy concepts around security in your Azure SQL Data Warehouse. For lots more detail, see the excellent documentation provided by Microsoft. Firewall Security The single most important aspect of security in and around Azure is the fact that for the public facing aspects (and the database stuff is public facing), there is a built-in firewall. This firewall is enabled by default and actually can't…
You need to be aware that you're going to see differences when you're working with Azure SQL Database when it comes to wait statistics. If you're running a v12 Azure SQL Database (and if you're not, go fix it), you can run a query against sys.dm_os_wait_stats. Here's the output for the TOP 10 waits ordered by wait time on one of my databases: Everything you're used to seeing, right? Well... not quite. This is Azure SQL Database. So, let's use sys.dm_db_wait_stats, a DMO that is only available within Azure. This lists waits by database. The TOP 10 here are: You'll notice that these results are wildly different from those above. What we're looking is largely a server versus a database, but not completely. I mean that sys.dm_os_wait_stats is showing the waits for the…
I'm absolutely in love with the concept of being able to create a backup directly to a protected, off-site location. Yeah, you can spend all sorts of money on terribly wonderful technology to enable that within your enterprise. And if you have that kind of money, great. But, what if you're like most everyone else and you just want a little more protection without mortgaging the house? Let's take a look at one possibility, backup to URL. There have been ways to backup to hosted storage, whether it was DropBox, AWS or Azure blob storage, for quite a while. But, every method I tried out involved setting up some type of drive on your system. As soon as you had your K:\ drive mapped out to AWS or whatever, you…
I was searching all over the place to try to find out how to move files into Azure Storage. Most of the examples I could track down were for API calls through C#. There were very few examples using PowerShell, and most of those were for older versions of Azure. But, the one thing I've learned about Azure, it's a fast moving target. Sure enough, in March there were new PowerShell blob cmdlets released. This is great news. I was able to get this to work: [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\.NET SDK\2012-10\bin\Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll") $account = [Microsoft.WindowsAzure.CloudStorageAccount]::Parse("DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=mystorage;AccountKey=mykey") $client = [Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.CloudStorageAccountStorageClientExtensions]::CreateCloudBlobClient($account) $blob = $client.GetBlockBlob('container\adw.bacpac') $blob.UploadFile("c:\bu\adw.bacpac") But let's face it, this code makes more sense and is a heck of lot easier to write: $context = New-AzureStorageContext -StorageAccountName mystorage -StorageAccountKey mykey Set-AzureStorageBlobContent -Blob "adw.bacpac" -Container…
I'd really like to publish your article in SQL Server Standard. All I need from you is an abstract, a description of what the article will be. I've posted this before, but I've never provided examples. So, to get people started, here are a few examples of articles that have been accepted and will be published (shortly I hope). Here's a great example from Andy Leonard. It includes a great amount of detail, more than I need to make my decision, but with this much detail, the decision is much easier because I know exactly what this article is likely to look like: Â Â I'm interested in writing an article on SSISÂ for SQL Server Standard. I'd like to cover ways packages can exchange information at run-time. There are a couple…