Microsoft Azure Archives

Migrating SQL Server Database to Azure SQL (PaaS)

June 22, 2018June 22, 2018 Esat Erkeç Leave a comment

In this article, we will highlight SQL Server Data migration to Azure SQL (PaaS). You can find different approaches for this migration process because SQL Server offers different types of tools and features for this migration. Some of these are:

Database Migration Assistant
SQL Server Management Studio Deployment Wizard
SQL Server to Azure SQL replication

These migration approaches have some pros and cons. But if you ask my opinion, Data Migration Assistant is better than others because, in this migration process, you will face fewer migration problems or issues. Data Migration Assistant will be more helpful to handle these issues.

In this article, we will specifically mention Database Migration Assistant, also known as DMA. At the same time, we will make a small demo of SQL Server Management Studio Deployment Wizard.

Azure Cosmos DB Analysis

June 13, 2018June 13, 2018 Kiran Gutha Leave a comment

Azure Cosmos DB is the first globally distributed, multi-model database service for building world-scale applications. Over the years, it has been providing momentum for Microsoft’s Internet-scale services, which are now available to all Azure developers. The service is designed to allow customers to flexibly and horizontally scale throughput and storage across any number of geographic regions. Read More

Choosing Azure SQL Purchase Model and Service Tier

May 22, 2018May 23, 2018 Esat Erkeç Leave a comment

When we are beginning to think of migrating our on-premises databases to Azure SQL, we have to decide on a proper purchase model, a service tier, and a performance level. Before starting the Azure SQL migration process, we have to find logical and provable answers to the following questions:

Which purchase model is suitable for my apps and business requirements?
How much budget do I need?
Which performance level meets my requirements?
Can I achieve the acceptable performance of my apps?

Configuring Azure SQL Long-term Backup Retention

May 18, 2018May 18, 2018 Esat Erkeç Leave a comment

Backup is the most important case for database administration because it provides business continuity solutions for high availability and disaster recovery. For this reason, Azure SQL database (PaaS: platform as a service) can make a backup automatically and restore it at a point in time. However, the retention period of backup files changes according to the service tiers.

Azure SQL Geo-Replication and Failover Groups

April 25, 2018May 11, 2018 Esat Erkeç Leave a comment

Azure SQL offers different types of business continuity solutions. One of these solutions is Geo-Replication that provides an asynchronous database copy. You can store this copy in the same or different data center locations (regions). There can be four readable database copies. In the documentation of Microsoft notes, the recovery point objective (RPO is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time) is less than 5 seconds. If we want to automate and make (users will not affect) failover mechanism transparent, we have to create the auto-failover group.

Getting Started with SQL Server 2017 on Linux in the Azure portal

April 6, 2018May 11, 2018 Prashanth Jayaram Leave a comment

SQL Server 2017 now is considered as a hybrid database enterprise solution as it expands its market and is ported to other operating system platforms. It also includes mainstream support for Linux machines. The Cloud makes the life of administrator much easier, now it’s no longer daunting task to configure the SQL Server instance. The easiest way to explore SQL Server on Linux is to provision a virtual machine through Microsoft Azure portal – portal.azure.com. The Linux azure virtual machine will come pre-configured with Linux and SQL Server 2017.

Monitoring Azure SQL Database with Azure SQL Analytics

April 3, 2018May 11, 2018 Esat Erkeç Leave a comment

The most important and challenging responsibility of a database administrator is monitoring performance metrics. Because monitoring performance and troubleshooting performance issues are considered to be difficult. For this reason, we need diagnostic and monitoring tools to measure performance counters and metrics. For Azure SQL there is a tool which is named SQL Analytics. With this tool, we can measure and monitor Azure SQL databases and elastic pools. At the same time, we can create alerts for notifications. SQL Analytics offers performance metrics in graphical form. In this article, we will learn how to enable Azure SQL Analytics. Read More

Azure SQL Database Automatic Tuning

March 23, 2018May 11, 2018 Esat Erkeç Leave a comment

Microsoft has recently announced an incredible new feature – automatic tuning in Azure SQL Database. To be honest, I am thoroughly impressed with this feature because Microsoft engineers have sophisticatedly used artificial intelligence in SQL Azure performance tuning. The aim is to monitor Azure SQL database and send these observations to the built-in intelligence service that generates some recommendations. They can be applied at offpeak times. This feature has also simplified the work of database administrators; they don’t have to worry about SQL Azure database performance now.

Struggling with Data Export from Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM to External Portals

February 23, 2018February 23, 2018 Krutesh Amin Leave a comment

Though Microsoft Dynamics 365 does not offer any built-in feature to export the CRM data to external portals so far, there is a simple way to reach there. If we create a web API as an intermediate service using Azure Cloud Services, it can easily export the data to external portals via FTP.

The process of configuring the Cloud Service and Storage in order to export CRM data to an external portal is described below.

Creating Simple Linear Regression in Azure Machine Learning

January 12, 2018January 15, 2018 Esat Erkeç Leave a comment

In today’s world, it is not enough to simply analyze data, create reports or develop business intelligence projects. To discover the power of data, we have to modify data on machine learning models and to predict future.

In this article, we will discuss one of the simplest methods, a linear regression, that we are going to modify statically in Azure Machine Learning.