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Hardening Sentry One for Security

If you have an environment where you need to lock down Sentry One as much as possible, then this article should help. It is well known that the Sentry One service account needs to be a member of the Local Administrators group in each server it monitors, and also a member of the sysadmin role for each SQL Server instance. At the moment this is still a requirement, but if you can live without the Windows metrics, then you could run Sentry One in Limited Mode which will only gather SQL Server specific metrics. Some of our clients run in

Migrating SSIS Packages to SSIS Azure part Two – Automating the Deployment

Hello! If you’ve read and followed through my previous post, you will have World Wide Importers Integration Services project running in SSIS Azure. It’s all very interesting, go and have a read . One thing that is missing form that guide, the documentation, and SSIS in general, is how to automate SSIS Deployments. In the WWI SSIS project, there are connection managers that we had to manually update the values of to get it to work post-deploy. This is exactly the opposite of what we want to do. Back when SQL Server 2012 was known as Denali, one of the

CosmosDb, know your partition costs, well more or less

In my previous post Cosmos Db know your costs, and remember I made the point that by understanding RU costs early, you can make informed decisions in relation to document design and application CRUD and query operations. While it is easy and most certainly useful to arrive at a projected RU cost, using for example, the Request Units (RU) and Data Storage calculator or directly against a fixed 10GB collection via the Azure Portal (incidentally the same costs), the problem is these do not highlight RU costs when partitioning is required to support scale-out . Now if you know your

PowerQuery – The power of M

I love PowerBI, actually I love PowerQuery. It's a great way to combine data from around your business, across the web from anywhere. What I really like is very little is done automatically, i.e. it doesn't do the nice data type detection you get with Excel that screws your imports if the data type in a column differs from the first few rows to the rest of the file. Does that make it difficult to use. No its not. The nice thing is that its very easy to add additional columns, change data types, use expressions, combine datasets, and do

Why is SSDT Always Rebuilding My Constraints?

Hello! Let me begin by saying that I’m a big fan of SSDT. It’s free, it works with all flavours of Visual Studio, the team do their very best to keep up-to-date with features that are released with increasing regularity by Microsfot in both Azure and SQl Server on-prem. I’ve met the team a few times, and they’re genuinely keen to engage with the users of SSDT in how it can be better, and how it can be extensible. So, SSDT is a great tool. I said great, but not perfect. It has it's limitations, the same as any tool.

CosmosDb and CRUD with a S

In preparation for my talk on Azure SQL Database vs. CosmosDb - How do you choose   at giving a talk at sqlbits I spent a lot of time thinking about create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations, and concluded that with the advent of CosmosDb and its multi-model abstraction layer, CRUD needs a S. CRUD as an acronym has served software engineering very well by encapsulating the core actions of data persistence and retrieval. In the transition from the “ye olde” closed and monolithic systems to the current open, loosely coupled and distributed micro-service architectures via client server and

Getting started with Azure Policy

Recently as part of a data classification implementation certain aspects were implemented using Azure Policy, since is supports auditing of existing resources and can prevent non-compliant resources from being created in the first instance. Like most things, the documentation reads well and the samples seem useful, until one has to do something different and go off-piste. There are plenty of VM and tagging samples though not so many for Azure SQL Database. Therefore as Sabin is a data engineering consultancy, all examples given here will be Azure SQL Database focused and not the canonical VM as found in many examples.

Team City Meta Runner - Get Build Status

Hello! When building a deployment pipeline, the choice of tool is less important than the use of the tool: do you go for a tool that centrally controls the flow of a release, from build to running tests to actual deployment, or do you choose separate tools that are loosely hung together and execute a particular part of a release? From personal experience, I have preferred to use a tool to act as a control flow of the deployment pipeline, but leverage tools where there is clear sense to use them. A case in point is using TeamCity to run

Log Shipping: It's Better Than Bad It's Good!

I'm probably showing my age by quoting an old Ren and Stimpy cartoon here, but to be fair it probably sums up log shipping pretty well. This post is focusing on using a read-only log shipping database for reporting purposes, and the limitations of read-only log shipped databases. I also share some monitoring scripts and a few ideas on how to improve restore performance without having to upgrade the hardware/software. Despite the development of AlwaysOn in recent releases of SQL Server, log shipping is still a great way to set up a copy of databases to be used for reporting.

Continuous Integration with Jenkins, SQL Server and Windows Containers

Why use Windows Containers? When creating database applications we need consistency in all our environments to ensure quality releases. Traditionally developers might have their own instance of SQL Server on their workstation to develop against. Database projects would be created in SSDT and pushed to source control when ready for testing. If you’re not using SSDT for database development already, then you should seriously consider it to make your life easier and increase the quality of your releases. Ed Elliot explains why in this blog post . A problem with CI for databases is that databases are a shared resource

When are things equal in this world and when are they not. The mystery of NULLs

I was interested reading a post on the MVP group about DISTINCT FROM by Erland who was championing the IS DISTINCT FROM clause but had found a work around using INTERSECT. That led me to I dig into ansi and non ansi_null comparisons and what operators honour the setting and what ignore it.   To drive this I was doing a full join to find different rows between two tables. I always thought that setting ansi nulls would solve the problem of comparisons on A.Column = B.column i.e. you could just say A.Column <> B.Column rather than having to do