Voice of the DBA

Tag: Azure

  • T-SQL Tuesday #82–Azure SQL Database

    tsqltuesdayIt’s T-SQL Tuesday time and this month we have Jeffrey Verheul giving us the topic of the cloud, or Azure SQL Database. It’s a good topic, given how many people are talking about working in the cloud. There are also the tremendous resources that Microsoft is investing in Azure, so cloud database posts are a good thought for this month.

    Whether you are writing today (Sept 13) or at some point in the future, it’s fun and informative to participate in the T-SQL Tuesday blog party. Learn something and write about it.

    Azure SQL Database

    I have done a little work with Azure SQL Database, but not a log. I have a few ideas, but finding time and focusing has been a challenge. When I saw this topic I had all sorts of ideas, but since I was traveling and busy, I ended up arriving at the deadline without any work done.

    However, there was one thing I’ve been wanting to try in Azure, so I decided to make this the post. I wanted to create an Azure SQL Database using Powershell. This is a topic that I think lends itself to better orchestration and development, so here goes.

    The first step was a quick Google search, which led me to this post on how to Manage Azure SQL Database with Powershell. That’s what I really wanted to do, so I read a bit. The first step was to download the latest Azure Powershell. I did that and ran an install. This required a reboot, something I rarely like, but I swallowed my annoyance and restarted the desktop.

    Once that was done, I ran a couple cmdlets to get connected and check what resources I had. First, I had a login prompt.

    2016-09-13 14_10_50-Windows PowerShell credential request

    Then I got results. As you can see, I had a few, and the list actually scrolls down quite far.

    2016-09-13 14_23_23-powershell

    I then tested another cmdlet, Get-AzureRMResourceProvider, to get a list of regions.

    2016-09-13 14_25_22-powershell

    That worked, so let’s create a database. I used the New-AzureRMSqlDatabase cmdlet, which worked well. I provided the resource group name and servername I already had with a new database.

    2016-09-13 14_14_44-powershell

    That completed, and things looked good. I connected to the Portal, and sure enough, I had a new database.

    2016-09-13 14_15_23-dkranchapps - Microsoft Azure

    Of course, an S1 will eat up all my credits, so I changed that right away.

    2016-09-13 14_15_57-TSQLTuesday - Microsoft Azure

    That was pretty easy. I can see how I might now string together the creation of a database with some other work, perhaps adding data, certainly using the Redgate DLM Automation or ReadyRoll scripts to create objects, and then I can run things and tear them down.

    Speaking of which.

    2016-09-13 14_32_24-powershell

  • Learning Azure Data Platform

    One of the issues I’ve seen with Azure is that is changes rapidly. It’s cool in that new things get added and problems get addressed. There’s also a buzz with learning and working with Azure from many people, including lots of MVPs. This means we get lots of things written by technical experts, Microsoft, and casual experimenters.

    However that volume of stuff gets outdated quickly. I know in looking for answers why a few things in TFS on Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) didn’t work correctly had me wading through lots of fixes that weren’t applicable anymore. In fact, most of the information I found wasn’t helpful because that version of TFS online didn’t exist anymore.

    Grant Fritchey has an ambitious project to try and help cut through some of the clutter. He’s build a GitHub repo that has lots of community based resources.  He’s looking to get people to submit resources, take pull requests and hopefully keep this up to date.

    I’m not sure that he can handle the volume of information, but he can always give repo access to others and crowdsource the information. Assuming people get along, this should do well.

    Anyway, take a look, give feedback, and if you find good articles that help you learn about Azure, add them.

  • The Data Dewey Decimal System

    As a small child, I learned about the Dewey Decimal System in school. Those were the days when you wanted to look up some information or check a fact, you needed to peruse the dead tree books in a library, with information organized by the Dewey Decimal System in the US. At least, all libraries I used in school adhered to this.

    These days we usually use a computer of some sort for learning, research, or really most any work with data. Often I start with Google to find my way to the source of information, but that’s not something that necessarily works well with finding sets of data. It certainly doesn’t work well within a an organization.

    I saw recently that Microsoft announced the general availability of the Azure Data Catalog, which is designed to provide a catalog of data sets. In essence the Data Catalog is an index of the data sets that might be produced by your organization, with the information about the data filled in by the producer of data. Users that are looking for data can query the catalog instead of asking coworkers, wandering through the enterprise databases, or even relying on their own memory of where data might be located.

    At first this seems silly, after all, don’t people inside of an organization know where data is kept? Don’t they learn the servers, databases, and connection methods? Certainly many do, but as with the pace of change these days, as well as the rapidly growing number of ways to publish data these days, it’s entirely possible that many people aren’t aware of all the data sources available inside of an organization. Even at Redgate Software, with a few hundred employees, it is fairly difficult to keep track of what data exists in which location.

    The functionality of the Data Catalog seems a bit basic, and really almost like an extension of adding extended properties to various tables. Certainly things are centralized here, which is good. There are also ways to add other sources, such as SSRS reports, files, and even other relational sources. I’ll have to experiment a bit and see what’s available, and I might encourage you to do the same. The product relies on crowdsourcing, which can go really well, or really poorly, depending on how cooperative your crowd is.

    In any case, I do like the idea of having a central catalog that individuals can update as they produce data sources for others to consume and change what’s available. If it works well, with good searching and tagging, it might eliminate some of the redundant work often performed to surface data inside of any organization and let employees know how to find the answers to their questions.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

  • The Machines are Learning

    One of the technologies that Microsoft is promoting heavily is machine learning. This has rapidly gone from a technology that I heard little about to being in multiple keynotes that I’ve seen at large conferences this year. It almost seems that I can’t go a week without seeing some sort of machine learning article, announcement, or reference.

    How applicable is machine learning for most of us? I’m not sure, but banks have certainly taken advantage of machine learning to reduce their risks associated with fraud and their systems work well. In fact, given the ways in which I travel, I’m amazed that I don’t get more calls about fraud related to my card use. With me in a new state almost every month, on a very irregular schedule, sometimes buying computer supplies far from home, I get called by a bank once or twice a year.

    Across the ten or so calls I’ve gotten in the last few years, only one questioned legitimate purchases. The rest caught fraud on the same day that someone tried to use my card without my knowledge. That’s a very successful rate of both true positives, and a very, very low rate of false positives. I’m impressed.

    If you haven’t played with machine learning, Microsoft has made it easy to give a try in Azure. You don’t even need to put in a credit card to get up and working with machine learning. Whether it’s applicable to your industry or not, you’ll have to decide, but I do think that lots of tedious analysis that humans do now could be better done by a machine.

    At least after one of us humans has configured the algorithms and trained the machine to recognize patterns. And, of course, with one of us technologists periodically tuning the system to work better  and monitoring the analysis as data changes.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.