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Hi folks! My name is Felipe Binotto, Cloud Solution Architect, based in Australia. This post will be about a solution I recently deployed to a customer to Start/Stop VMs on a schedule. You may be asking yourself why we need another solution if two official solutions are already available for the same purpose. The answer is straightforward – the solution I propose is simple and flexible and, in my opinion, the existing solutions are not. The two official solutions still do a great job and may be a better fit for your environment. You can check them in the following links: Start/Stop VMs v1 Start/Stop VMs v2 The solution I propose is centralized for manageme…

Introduction Typical security measures may assist data at rest and in transit but can fall short of fully protecting data while it is actively used in memory. Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) provides a protective hardware environment to secure data used in memory. For confidential computing, users can create Virtual Machines (VMs) with Intel® SGX to secure their applications during computation. However, building an end-to-end confidential computing application is not only knowledge intensive, but also requires a sound understanding of the application, Intel® SGX, and other security components. This blog introduces you to a confidential comput…

Database Backup & Restore capabilities are crucial for ensuring Business continuity and Disaster recovery. Restore database operation is usually done in critical situations like hardware failure, application errors, ransomware attacks, accidental deletion of database etc., to restore a production database to latest known stable state. In such critical situations users would want to track the progress of restore operation accurately so that they can plan for subsequent actions and/or alternatives. Currently in Azure SQL DB, you can view the database restore progress either using Portal or using T-SQL as follows: Portal displays whether the database restore…

This blog is the complement of another blog which is related to Azure Event Hub Schema Registry. As we known, it’s not supported to migrate Confluent(Kafka) schema registry into Azure schema registry directly. We need to create and manage the scheme registry in the azure event hub separately. The good news is Azure Event Hub supplies multiple client sdks for us to use to serialize and deserialize payloads containing schema registry identifiers and avro-encoded data. In this section, I’d like to share how to use python sdk to send or receive events with schema registry in the Azure Event Hub mostly. Prerequisites: 1.Create a schema registry group in the event …

English: In this chapter, we are going to review with Pablo Javier Fernandez Salazar, our Cloud SQL Architect colleague, how to detect a performance issue and find out the query that is causing it. Once identified, we will review its behavior, we will review the execution plans and we will solve the problem. Spanish: Este capítulo vamos a conversar con Pablo Javier Fernandez Salazar, nuestro compañero de Cloud SQL Architect, cómo detectar una incidencia de rendimiento y conocer la query que lo está provocando. Una vez identificada revisaremos el comportamiento de la misma , revisaremos los planes de ejecución y resolveremos el problema. Enjoy…

Context Many ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) are exchanging information with devices, applications, services, or humans. In many cases the information passed can be a file or a blob. Each of these ISVs would need to implement such a service. In the past few months, I discussed this capability with several (over 4) different customers, each with slightly unique needs. When I tried to generalize the need, it was clear: they wanted a quick, safe means to exchange files with customers or devices. So, I tried to translate these asks into user stories: As a service provider, I need my customers to upload content in a secure, easy-to-maintain micro-servi…

Happy Friday, MTC! It’s 11/11 – time to make a wish - and lets see what’s been going on in the community this week! MTC Moments of the Week Our MTC Member of the Week spotlight is on @Chandrasekhar_Arya for being a rockstar in the Azure forums, both in starting discussions and helping out other MTC’ers! We really appreciate your contributions to the community :) Next up, we had another double-header in community events this week! First was our Microsoft Viva Goals AMA, where MTC’ers had the opportunity to ask questions about the Viva Goals goal setting and OKR management solution and get answers from the experts, including @lucyhitz, @Ashwin_Jeyakumar…

Pre-Requisites: You should have access to Power Apps, Power Automate, and a SharePoint site before you begin this tutorial. Why: You'd like to be able to make users selected local documents publicly visible on a SharePoint site and there is no built-in controller for Power Apps when attempting to attach general local files. Steps: Create Power App Solution Rename the app's start screen. Create a New SharePoint Document Library Called Files Make sure to include a column called 'Name' and any other relevant column titles. Insert an Attachments Control in Power App …

Issue A backend compatibility issue was encountered recently when the creation of a non-clustered index on a partitioned table of a hyper-scale Azure SQL DB failed with the error 666. The table in question had almost 3.5 Billion records and already had a clustered Index & 3 other non-clustered indexes present. You may receive an error as shown below: Error In addition to the error above- here is the error text Msg 666, Level 16, State 2, Line 25 The maximum system-generated unique value for a duplicate group was exceeded for the index with partition ID. Dropping and re-creating the index may resolve this; otherwise, use another clustering key.; …

The new Microsoft 365 Defender alerts API, currently in public preview, enables customers to work with alerts across all products within Microsoft 365 Defender using a single integration. The API provides alerts from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Azure Active Directory Identity Protection, and Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention and we will continue to expand it in the future. We want customers to have the best possible experience across Microsoft Defender products, which is enabled through the new, central API. Therefore we will be deprecating the …

If you don't know where to start building your first streaming application, check out this GitHub repository for easy deployment of a complete streaming application. Just follow the instructions on README and run a few commands in PowerShell, it will deploy all the resources required for a streaming application with an auto-generated data stream. This is an effortless way to build and explore what a streaming application can do with real-life streaming data. What are the benefits of using this deployment method? Easy to deploy. It saves you time reading documentation, preparing input data, and setting up a Stream Analytic job in the Azure portal. Test a Str…

When deploying an HPC Pack workload to the Azure public cloud, until recently, it could be challenging to deploy a highly available, Active Directory-integrated file share to host your SMB shares related to the workload. Most of the options were self-managed or third-party appliances. HPC Pack environments typically feature several shares that are used for Compute Node application installs, hosting of model or resource files, and runtime scratch shares. The latter two shares require increased bandwidth focus due to the number of nodes pulling similar files at the same time. A brief overview of the AD-Integrated SMB Share ecosystem: Windows Server VMs – Benefits:…

Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 5.1 Preview 2 has been released. This release contains improvements and updates to the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient data provider for SQL Server. Our plan is to provide GA releases twice a year with two or three preview releases in between. This cadence should provide time for feedback and allow us to deliver features and fixes in a timely manner. This second 5.1 preview includes fixes and changes over the previous preview release. Added Added target-specific support for .NET 6.0 and dropped support for .NET Core 3.1. #1704 #1823 Added support for DateOnly and TimeOnly for SqlParameter value and GetFieldValue. #1813 Added support for T…

As macro-economic uncertainty grows in today’s economy so do expectations to accelerate growth, drive revenue higher, and compete beyond the status quo. Early October, Azure launched a campaign to address this unprecedented situation by empowering businesses to “Do More with Less”. The campaign focuses on three value elements – migrating and saving, optimizing existing cloud investments, and reinvesting to drive growth. Read more about each of these topics here. All three highlight the importance of cost optimization in one way or another. Azure Advisor is at the front and center of making some of these objectives a reality. However, you may wonder how this product may he…

Database Migration Assessment for Oracle, an Azure Data Studio extension powered, now offers a migration assessment for moving from Oracle Database to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. The assessment includes database migration recommendations and an evaluation of database code complexity. Through the same tooling, customers can get target sizing recommendations for Oracle Database migration to Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, which is ideal for large workloads up to 100 TB. These updates are in preview. With these changes, migration planning is simplified for Oracle customers looking to modernize their data estate …

Database Migration Assessment for Oracle, an Azure Data Studio extension powered, now offers a migration assessment for moving from Oracle Database to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. The assessment includes database migration recommendations and an evaluation of database code complexity. Through the same tooling, customers can get target sizing recommendations for Oracle Database migration to Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, which is ideal for large workloads up to 100 TB. These updates are in preview. With these changes, migration planning is simplified for Oracle customers looking to modernize their data estate …

Process Explorer v17.02 This update to Process Explorer fixes two bugs that can lead to crashes and another that leads to an unexpected dialog in an error case. Sysmon v14.12 This update to Sysmon fixes a bug related to volumes without file system security. Continue reading...

Meet the Team James Parkington Matching Algorithm Engineer, Web Role Secuity Engineer, Portfolio Developer Rory Nicholas Spokesperson, Portfolio Developer, Front-end Developer Teodora Lovin Team Lead, System and Database Architect, Client Liaison Project Abstract Universities around the world have the annual task of allocating each of their final-year students a supervisor. Many of these universities, including University College London 'UCL', still sift through large spreadsheets manually looking for matches between students and supervisors. UCL also did not have a standardized way to facilitate communication between prospective su…

Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro, amongst other Server OEMs, announced availability today of new systems running on AMD EPYC™ processor-based servers designed to optimize performance, transaction processing rates, availability, and security with SQL Server 2022 — currently in preview. With the rise of relational and nonrelational data comes incredible opportunities to gain insight into your business operations. SQL Server running on AMD EPYC processors provides a modernized database platform that increases performance, improves efficiency, decreases required power, and saves physical data center space compared with prior AMD releases. Azure-enabled capabi…

Article contributed by Amirreza Rastegari, Jon Shelley, Jithin Jose, Anshul Jain, Jyothi Venkatesh, Joe Greenseid, Fanny Ou, and Evan Burness Azure has announced new HBv4-series and HX-series virtual machines (VMs) for high performance computing (HPC). This blog provides in-depth technical and performance information about these new VMs. These VMs are powered by the latest technologies, including: 4th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs (Genoa while in Preview, Genoa-X at General Availability in 1H2023) 800 GB/s of DDR5 memory bandwidth (STREAM TRIAD) 400 Gb/s NVIDIA Quantum-2 CX7 InfiniBand, the first on the public cloud 80 Gb/s Azure Accelerated Networking 3.6 TB lo…

PostgreSQL 15 improves crash recovery and physical replication performance of some large and very busy databases by trying to minimise I/O stalls. A standby server might now have an easier time keeping up with the primary. How? The change in PostgreSQL15 is that recovery now uses the maintenance_io_concurrency setting (default is 10, but you can increase it) to decide how many concurrent I/Os to try to initiate, rather than doing random read I/Os one at a time. With big and busy databases, when I/O concurrency increases, replication lag can be reduced. In this blog post, you'll learn how recovery prefetching minimises I/O stalls and reduces replication lag i…

I recently had a customer that was looking to consolidate two public services, with two public identities, on a single VM Scale Set while keeping distinct front-end IPs, allowing for cost efficiency on Azure resources while still giving front-end flexibility. This post gets into some of the details of the implementation. High-Level Designs The starting design was a pretty standard “isolated service” type design: The goal was to consolidate to a single environment with two identities, with the two services on the back end on unique ports: Implementation For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use a new, simple environment, but the con…

Before joining Microsoft, I spent three semesters teaching Python in UC Berkeley’s CS61A, the first class in their CS sequence. I really liked Python as a teaching language and as a first language for many students, due to its relatively low usage of punctuation and its tendency to read like an English sentence. However, as it is a text-based language, there are still many frustrating ways to mess up a Python program – spelling things wrong, indenting incorrectly, not using the right function for the job, etc. – and new programmers can have a particularly hard time understanding how to fix incorrect code. Teachers and TAs can help students decipher errors, but we’re …

The Azure Communication Services team is excited to share our product and feature updates for November 2022. (You can view previous blog articles here.) This month’s update describes the three features below: UI Library update: 1:N and PSTN support UI Library update: Role-controlled Rooms support Virtual Visits Solution: Post Call Survey UI Library update: 1:N and PSTN Support The Azure Communication Services UI Library is adding new capabilities to support PSTN and 1:1 outbound calling that can be added to your application with only a couple lines of code. These new capabilities support developers in building common scenarios like dialer…

In May 2020, we announced plans to have more granular privacy controls within Microsoft products. This is part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to providing products, information and controls that lets you choose how your data is collected and used. After this announcement, several controls have been released. Now we would like to announce the release of peopleInsights admin controls. The hundreds of millions of users of Microsoft 365 cloud services form part of the core of Microsoft Graph. The users' data is carefully managed, protected, and with proper authorization, made available by Microsoft Graph services to drive productivity and creativity in businesses.…