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This blog co-authored by Alexander Spiridonov- Senior Solutions Architect at NVIDIA Introduction Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is a massively parallel sequencing technology that offers ultra-high throughput, scalability, and speed. The technology is used to determine the order of nucleotides in entire genomes or targeted regions of DNA or RNA. NGS has revolutionized the biological sciences, allowing labs to perform a wide variety of applications and study biological systems at a level never before possible. NGS makes large-scale whole-genome sequencing (WGS) accessible and practical for the average researcher. It enables scientists to analyze the …

Quick Question How Good are you with answering business questions using Microsoft Power BI? You don't have to rate yourself on any scale, I have a challenge for you. Consider the use case described below and the accompanied data, carry out a detailed analysis using Microsoft Powr BI. This is the only way to convince me how good you are with answering business questions. Use Case Description A company in the environmental consulting industry is seeking to analyze the air quality in a specific city during hot and cold weather, during high-wind conditions and during precipitation. They are interested in making recommendations to the governme…

The 202 pattern is a way to handle long-running requests in a scalable and resilient manner. The basic idea is to accept a request, but instead of processing it immediately, return a "202 Accepted" response, with a location header that points to a status endpoint. The client can then poll the status endpoint to check the progress of the request. Further reading - Asynchronous Request-Reply pattern - Azure Architecture Center.   Whats is the Use Cases? This pattern can be used in the following scenarios: Where the request processing time may vary significantly, or Where the client does not need to wait for the request to complete before performi…

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with a Microsoft Integration expert, Sandro Pereira, to discuss BizTalk Server to Azure Integration Services migrations. In this video, he will share some of his real-world experience of migrating customers to Azure Integration Services. This is a follow-up to Part 1 of this series where I chatted with Michael Stephenson and Stephen W Thomas. To view that video, please click on the following link. In my conversation with Sandro, we cover the following topics: What are some examples of BizTalk migrations that you have been involved in? What is the biggest driver for these customers? When considering BizTalk ar…

In several service requests our customers asked how to check the performance of a database. During this discussion we reached to discuss why is important to check Wait Stats, for example, CXPACKET, SOS_SCHEDULING_YIELD, PAGEIOLATCH, PAGELATCH, etc.. among others, because that means what is waiting for SQL Server to execute the workload. In a performance scenario, normally, I used to review two main things: Resources consumption: High CPU: might means that we have Conversion Implicit, missing indexes, a lot of workers working in parallel, a lot of single process running concurrently, bad execution plan based on statistics, parameter sniffing, etc.. High Da…

In some situations, we saw that our customers are trying to export their database to a blob storage that is behind a firewall, currently this operation is not supported Export a database to a BACPAC file - Azure SQL Database & Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft Learn Exporting a database we need to review some considerations in terms of storage: If you are exporting to blob storage, the maximum size of a BACPAC file is 200 GB. To archive a larger BACPAC file, export to local storage with SqlPackage. Exporting a BACPAC file to Azure premium storage using the methods discussed in this article is not supported. Storage behind a firewall is cu…

In some specific situations, our customer needs to block a connection from a single user. For example, users that they have to connect to the secondary replica using ApplicationIntent=Readonly but they are not doing this change in the connection string and connect to the primary replica by mistake or customers that they need to know who is connecting and/or block the connection if needed for specific situation. To know who is connecting: Besides that we could use XEvents overview - SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn we could use Audit SQL Managed Instance auditing - Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft L…

We used to have situations where our customer needs to export 2 TB of data using SQLPackage in Azure SQL Database. Exporting this amount of data might take time and following we would like to share with you some best practices for this specific scenario. If you’re exporting from General Purpose Managed Instance (remote storage), you can increase remote storage database files to improve IO performance and speed up the export. Temporarily increase your compute size. Limit usage of database during export (like in Transactional consistency scenario consider using dedicated copy of the database to perform the export operation) Use a Virtual Machine in Azure with Ac…

Yesterday, we got an interested service request where our customer saw SATELLITE_SERVICE_SETUP waits stat in their query execution time. This wait stat is regarding about external execution scripts. Our customer found several performance issue running in paralell multiple executions of Python scripts in the SQL MI database using R with EXECUTE sp_execute_external_script . After an investigation with our Azure Product Team we explained the details found Key differences for Machine Learning Services - Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft Learn As you could see in this URL Key differences for Machine Learning Services - Azure SQL Managed Instance | Mi…

Today, we got an new service request that our customer is facing an error message when testing the connection in a Linked Service to Azure SQL MI from ADF:" The value of the property '' is invalid: 'Value does not fall within the expected range.'. Value does not fall within the expected range. Activity ID: b6e998fa-xxxx-xxxx-xxx" In this situation, our customer is facing this error from a connection failure from Azure Data Factory to Azure SQL Managed Instance using a System Managed Identity. Afer some investigations we identified that Managed Private Endpoints was missing after they created and approved it, our customer was able to connect from Azure Data …

Ready to take your Microsoft Fundamentals knowledge to the next level or you are journey to attain professional Microsoft Certifications? You’ve come to the right place! The normal journey with certifications is to start off with the basics i.e. your Fundamentals certifications and work your way up the ladder. For the Power Platform, there’s a list of Associate Level certifications including the PL:100 Power Platform App Maker certificate which offers you a deep dive and practical knowledge of the Power Platform. The app maker builds solutions to simplify, automate, and transform tasks and processes for themselves and their team where they have deep expertise in t…

Hello, everyone, and Happy Friday! Let's recap a few of the highlights from the past week! MTC Moments of the Week To kick things off, our MTC Member of the Week spotlight is one of our top contributors for the week and an Office Apps & Services MVP, @Juan Carlos González Martín! We’re honored to have you in the community! We had our first Ask Microsoft Anything’s (AMA’s) of 2023 this Tuesday! First up, we had the Windows 365 for Gov AMA, which featured expert panelists @Robert_Nishi, @Roy Barton, and @PhilWest answering questions about Windows 365 and collecting feedback! After that, we had a Microsoft Loop AMA, where @Shane Chism, …

The Well-Architected Framework for Oracle has been published! Oracle workloads - Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework | Microsoft Learn This invaluable framework provides clear guidance on the recommended practices to assess, architect and migrate Oracle workloads to the Azure cloud. This should be the first place for answers to success for Oracle on Azure! A special thanks to my teammate, Jessica Haessler for working so hard to help me get this to the finish line, as I would have never been able to get this done on my own! Continue reading...

To improve our capabilities in evaluating driver quality, the Windows Audio and Graphics Teams have developed new machine measures to improve the evaluation of Windows drivers. New measures The following measures are currently in evaluation for feedback through 2/21/23 and will be operationalized into Driver Shiproom publishing decisions in February of 2023. Evaluation New Measure ID Percentage of devices with SWDRM playback that triggered the Catalog reload event 41328752 Percent of machines with at least one APO disablement in past 7 days 41929221 Continue reading...

Q: How do I get my Translator containers to work the same way as Azure Translator? A: Integrate it with the text-analytics container. This is part 3 of a series on cognitive services, specifically on how to leverage Translator in Azure and in containers so if you would like to catch up please check out the previous posts here: Part 1: How do I use Azure Cognitive Services like Translator? - Q: How do I use Azure Cognitive Services like Translator? Part 2: How do I use connected containerized Azure Cognitive Services? - Q: How do I use connected containerized Azure Cognitive Services? We have come a long ways but the issue we’re going to address t…

Q: How do I use connected containerized Azure Cognitive Services? A: Deployment is a little different, but you use them the same way as the Azure resource. Last week we looked at how to deploy Azure Cognitive Services, specifically Translator. If you haven’t read the first part of this series, consider reviewing it first here: Q: How do I use Azure Cognitive Services like Translator? Part two of this series will cover how to leverage the same Translator service but by deploying and querying a container you have running in your own environment instead of the Azure resource running in Azure. Deploying your own container to host cognitive services requires t…

Q: How do I use Azure Cognitive Services like Translator? A: There are many ways! I’ll show you some examples to get you started. Cognitive Services refers to a wide variety of PaaS solutions that leverage AI. There are many services including speech to text, text to speech, sentiment analysis, conversational language understanding, translation, computer vision, Face API, anomaly detection, content moderator, and others. That is a lot of stuff and I’m not going to dive into all of it today but want to walk through how I’ve used Azure Translator today. Next week we’ll dive into how folks can deploy their own translator containers, then later we’ll cover how to ma…

Disclaimer This document is not meant to replace any official documentation, including those found at docs.microsoft.com. Those documents are continually updated and maintained by Microsoft Corporation. If there is a discrepancy between this document and what you find in the Compliance User Interface (UI) or inside of a reference in docs.microsoft.com, you should always defer to that official documentation and contact your Microsoft Account team as needed. Links to the docs.microsoft.com data will be referenced both in the document steps as well as in the appendix. All the following steps should be done with test data, and where possible, testing should be …

We recently found an issue enabling an Extended Event that our customer got the following error message: Msg 25632, Level 16, State 29, Line 1 - The specified buffer size is less than the minimum size. The minimum allowed size is xzy bytes (where xyz is a number in KB). In this situation, I would like to suggest changing the MAX_MEMORY parameter of the extended event to, at least, the value in megabytes specified in xyz (previously in KB). For example, we have this extended event without specifying MAX_MEMORY. CREATE EVENT SESSION [ADS_Standard_Azure4] ON DATABASE ADD EVENT sqlserver.attention( ACTION(package0.event_sequence,sqlser…

We have released for general availability Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 5.1. This .NET Data Provider for SQL Server provides general connectivity to the database and supports all the latest SQL Server features for applications targeting .NET, .NET Framework, and .NET Standard. To try out the new package, add a NuGet reference to Microsoft.Data.SqlClient in your application. If you've been following our preview releases, you know we've been busy working to add features and improve stability and performance of the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient library. Highlights Some of the highlights of new features in 5.1 over the 5.0 release of Microsoft.Data.SqlClie…

How to Use TSSv2 to Collect Data and Analyze to Solve High CPU Issues. Hello everyone, this is Denzel Maxey with the Windows Performance Team. I found a tool that actively collects different data based on scenarios and streamlines the data collection process. Drumroll – introducing TSSv2 (Troubleshooting Support Script). In my job, I see a lot of High CPU cases and collecting an ETL trace using TSSv2 with Xperf aka WPR for high CPU has been fundamental in resolving issues. I’d like to share some instructions, methods, and just insight on the tools in general that should be able to empower IT professionals resolve issues. This post will show how the TSSv2 tool c…

With support from Azure for Operators, Deutsche Telekom has now reached a major milestone in its NIMS (Next Generation IP Multimedia Subsystem) project. Over ten million voice subscribers have now been successfully migrated to the company's new IP-based voice telephony platform, which is fully automated. The NIMS project, which began with the goal of "cloudifying" and automating the core of Deutsche Telekom's voice network, has now also processed billions of voice minutes through the new platform, with around 100 interconnect partners. One of the key innovations of the NIMS project is its end-to-end automation. By building a detailed framework of au…

Azure Neural Text-to-Speech (Neural TTS) is a powerful tool that allows users to turn text into lifelike speech. It has a wide range of applications, including voice assistants, content read-aloud capabilities, and accessibility tools. In the past few months, Azure Neural TTS has made significant improvements in naturalness of speech, variety of voices, language support, and more. In this blog, we summarize the latest updates on our low-resource technology, which has enabled Azure Neural TTS to expand to global languages quickly and allows speakers of under-represented languages to equally benefit from our product. Since the first release of low-resource voi…

We recently enabled a new feature in Office 365, which allows tenant admins to assign more than one Exchange Online license per AAD user. SharePoint Online and Teams, for example, have been supporting concurrent license assignments for their own services for some time now. Our new feature hence helps bring the same level of support to Exchange Online. How does it work? To better understand what this feature changes, let's compare the old behavior of Exchange Online license management, with the new behavior. Previous experience When tenant admins tried to assign more than one license pack (which contains Exchange Online) to the same AAD user, either thro…

While Azure Maps is strong in visualizing and interacting with map- and location data, you probably also need a secure and powerful location to store and query your (location) data. In this blog post, we will explore the different options for storing and querying geospatial data in Azure, including Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Blob Storage. Storing and querying geospatial data in Azure is a powerful and flexible way to manage and analyze large sets of geographic information. Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database that supports document, key-value, graph, and column-family data models. One of the key features of Cosmos DB is …