Voice of the DBA

Tag: Microsoft

  • The Non Profit Cloud

    I ran across someone awhile ago that works with a nonprofit charity. The organization was seeking to move some of their IT infrastructure to the cloud. This person was wondering if Azure had any discounts or programs for charities, and it didn’t appear there was any type of program when I looked. That was disappointing as many charities work hard to help those affected in some way, but budgets and money are always tight.

    I wish I’d know at the time that Microsoft had announced a program that can help. They are donating $1 billion over five years to nonprofits and university researchers. Their goal is to reach 70,000 nonprofits and help them use IT to better serve their causes. This is part of the Microsoft Philanthropy segment of the company and it’s a welcome change to me. I support Microsoft and use their software, but I also am glad to see them looking at more than profits and incorporating some social responsibility into their work.

    I’m sure charities appreciate the assistance, though this isn’t without some costs. Moving applications to the cloud can be expensive in terms of software development, and certainly there are ongoing costs. I’d like to think that the ability to scale resources to meet demand works better in the cloud, and certainly there are some software products Microsoft has that charities will find cheaper in the cloud over time.

    The donations will also help many university projects, which I’m guessing will both gain insights from data analysis in the cloud, and hopefully also help Microsoft (and the rest of us) better understand what techniques for working with data work well and don’t work well in the cloud. I know the Azure SQL Data Warehouse looks interesting to me, especially in terms of building a DW in a way that doesn’t require large on premise investments. I’m hoping to get a chance to take some SSC data and experiment with it there in a limited basis, turning off the systems when I don’t have time to work with them.

    I’m glad to see Microsoft supporting nonprofit organizations, and I hope that I see more GiveCamps and other efforts from software professionals to likewise support organizations that are aligned with their own values.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn

  • The Data Platform is Important

    I didn’t attend the //build/ conference this year and am slightly disappointed. Only slightly, since I was in these cities in May already and didn’t need another trip: London, Los Angeles, Austin, Brisbane. In addition, my family had to celebrate a birthday, an anniversary, Mother’s Day, and a graduation in May. A busy month for me.

    However, I did watch some of the keynotes and streamed a few sessions. I have more on my list, but one of the big things I noticed is covered in this article: the data platform is becoming more important. Both to Microsoft and their customers as we all start to depend not only on software, but on the data that powers our software systems. More and more executives are waking up to appreciate not only the value of data as an asset, but also that it needs protecting.

    At the conference, there were some announcements that give us more options and more opportunity as SQL Server professionals. We get SQL Server on the Edge, running on ARM platforms, as well as some caching improvements in Azure SQL Data Warehouse. While not a lot of people use ASDW, the technologies that Microsoft builds here are filtering down to the on-premises version of SQL Server. Keep an eye on this caching to come in 2021 or 2022 to all of us.

    There were other items, but one thing that strikes me more and more: this is an exciting time to be working on the Microsoft Data Platform.

  • Clearing an Email from the Microsoft Directory

    Years ago I was working on a demo with Microsoft and someone added me to their VSTS (now Azure DevOps) project. Somehow, I got an account in the Live/Passport/Joe-Schmo Azure directory with my red-gate.com email. This hasn’t been a problem for a long time, but recently I had issues.

    At Redgate Software, we use Office 365 for a lot of stuff (email, apps, etc.). Lately I’ve been getting a number of documents to edit in our shared, Sharepoint folders. Mostly this is Kendra’s fault, but as I’ve done more prep stuff for customers, I get links from others.

    While I can access them, if I click a link, I get a browser window that opens and tells me that it can’t access the document because I’m logged in with my way0utwestxxxxxx account. That’s true, since I use that for the portal. I click the “sign out and sign in again, and I’ll get taken to the login page.

    2019-04-26 14_20_09-Sign in to Microsoft Azure

    However, this is a login for a personal account, not an organization account. As a result, as soon as I enter my password, I get:

    2019-04-26 12_45_25-Sign in is not complete

    That’s true, but it’s also not true. I do have a valid @red-gate.com account that was entered, but this is apparently stuck thinking I’m using a personal account and doesn’t let me change to an organizational account.

    What’s weird is that if I go to a URL, like our info site, or the IT site, I get the option to enter an account. When I do, it goes to the organizational signin.

    The Fix

    I’ve let this go, mostly because I don’t do much document collaboration, but lately it’s been a problem. I finally pinged the IT staff and they gave me the fix.

    • Log into https://account.microsoft.com/profile with the problem personal account.
    • Click on “Contact info”
    • Click on “Manage this email address”
    • Click on “Add email”
    • Create a new email Address
    • Change the new email address to the primary
    • Now remove the old personal email from the account.

    I’d have probably been able to figure all of this out if I’d known about account.microsoft.com. I kept thinking Passport, Live, all the auth services I’ve used in the past.

    Hopefully now I’ll remember if this happens again, or perhaps this will help someone else.

  • A Week of SQL Server 2019

    I’m in Redmond, or Bellevue, or somewhere nearby. Not completely sure where the Microsoft MVP Summit is this week (as I write this). I’ve got travel planned, so I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

    In any case, I can’t talk about anything I see this week for now, but I am excited. It’s a week of SQL Server 2019 and future work that’s coming to us at some point. I don’t always get excited about new versions, and SQL Server 2017 wasn’t one, but I’m changing my mind.

    I think SQL Server 2019 is going to be a new evolution of the platform, with the Big Data Clusters and K8s support. This is going to change how we deal with data over time.

    Don’t ask questions for now, but as soon as I can write about things, I will.