Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * New T-SQL language features are available in memory-optimized tables and natively compiled stored procedures in premium tiers of Azure SQL Database. *  Amazon Maturity Ratings (for its Prime Video titles) are closely based on established ratings classification systems from across the globe *  The world’s biggest iPhone factory is Foxconn’s plant in Zhengzhou * The map most widely adopted for educating youngsters was created by Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish geographer and cartographer, in 1569. The distortions give the impression that Greenland is the same size as Africa. It is no larger than the Democratic Republic of Congo & many times smaller than Africa - Economist * Viruses can kill bacteria that antibiotics cannot. Bacteria-infecting viruses, known as bacteriophages, were discovered a century ago. They make a living by slipping inside their microbial hosts and hijacking their biochemistry to make many new copies of themselves....

The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation in short (GHMC) is the administrative body responsible for the civic and infrastructural assets of Hyderabad, the capital and largest city in the State of Telangana, and Secunderabad. Hyderbad is spread across 650 square kilometres (250 sq mi) & has a population of over 7 million which makes it the sixth most populous urban agglomeration in India Under the Government of India, Ministry of Urban Development's ' Swachh Survekshan 2017 ' campaign, a total of 500 towns and cities will be ranked and rewarded with awards for active implementation of the mission initiatives in a timely and innovative manner . GHMC has sent out text messages to citizens to "join hands in making our Hyderabad THE cleanest city". But is GHMC doing its bit? GHMC offers a "Grievance Redressal System" through an easy to remember URL (as a domain name will cost public money) for citizens to log their complaints -   http://210.212.21...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Analysis Services is built on the proven analytics engine in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. Azure Analysis Services delivers enterprise-grade BI semantic modeling capabilities with the scale, flexibility and management benefits of the cloud. Azure Analysis Services helps you transform complex data into actionable insights. *  We can now access video and audio and use WebRTC to build a live video-chat web apps directly in the browser, no native app or plugin required. We can build progressive web apps that bring users an almost native app experience, with a launch icon, notifications, offline support and more. Using geolocation, battery status, ambient light detection, Bluetooth and the physical web, we can even go beyond responsive web design and build websites that will automagically adapt to users' needs and context . *  Google is steadily moving to a mobile-only world. In a mobile-only world, the relevance of local se...

This Week I Learned - *  Zebra is pure WEB based alternative to Flash or Applet technologies that doesn’t require a plugging on a client side to be installed. The  Zebra  JavaScript library provides HTML5 Canvas based rich UI and includes Java to JavaScript converter tool *  Freelancers now account for nearly 35% of the U.S. workforce * Microsoft’s Windows 10 can switch back and forth between a touch-friendly interface or the traditional desktop system. Windows 10 has a Tablet Mode that shifts the user interface from a “point-and-click” to “a tap-and-drag” method of input. * The Seattle Seahawks and Los Angeles Clippers practice yoga in a team setting, and many top sports professionals, including the basketball star LeBron James and the tennis champion Novak Djokovic have incorporated yoga into their training programs - NY Times

The following table summarizes the features offered by each service : Service Azure Load Balancer Application Gateway Traffic Manager Technology Transport level (Layer 4) Application level (Layer 7) DNS level Application protocols supported Any HTTP, HTTPS,  HTTP/2 & WebSockets Any (An HTTP endpoint is required for endpoint monitoring) Endpoints Azure VMs and Cloud Services role instances Any Azure Internal IP address or public internet IP address Azure VMs, Cloud Services, Azure Web Apps, and external endpoints Vnet support Can be used for both Internet facing and internal (Vnet) applications Can be used for both Internet facing and internal (Vnet) applications Only supports Internet-facing applications Endpoint Monitoring Supported via probes Supported via probes Supported via HTTP/HTTPS GET Health Monitoring TCP probe HTTP probe HTTP probe HTTPS probe TCP probe HTTP probe HTTPS probe Source IP/Sticky session Supported, 2-...

Architecture diagram source:  Running Windows VMs for an N-tier architecture on Azure Elements of the architecture diagram: - Availability sets. Create an availability set for each tier, and provision at least two VMs in each tier. This is required to reach the availability SLA for VMs. - Subnets. Create a separate subnet for each tier. Specify the address range and subnet mask using CIDR notation. - Load balancers. Use an Internet-facing load balancer to distribute incoming Internet traffic to the web tier, and an internal load balancer to distribute network traffic from the web tier to the business tier. - Jumpbox. Also called a bastion host. A secure VM on the network that administrators use to connect to the other VMs. The jumpbox has an NSG that allows remote traffic only from public IP addresses on a safe list. The NSG should permit remote desktop (RDP) traffic. - NSGs. Use network security groups (NSGs) to restrict network traffic within the VNet. For example,...

Maybe it's a slight exaggeration, but I loved this comforting answer from a question in this  fun ML quiz - How much math do you need to know to create and use Machine Learning algorithms? >> You need to understand the basics and have good intuition, but today, almost everything is an API Predictive Analytics and Cognitive Computing are different areas of machine learning (supervised and unsupervised). Both would make an application more intelligent. Once you have built a predictive model with R, you can consume it from your apps by having AzureML expose it as a REST service and also SQL Server can run it in the database Within the Cognitive Services portfolio, the Emotion API recognizes human emotions on pictures with the aid of a well-trained Neural Network. Emotion API now can detect emotions in videos, as well as static images Related: Machine Learning Algorithm Cheat Sheet Data Science for Beginners

This Week I Learned - *  A Site to Site VPN can be established from Azure to any on-premises network and can even be used with other cloud networks such as AWS Virtual Private Cloud. Please note that you must have a Public IP for your other network's VPN gateway and cannot be behind an NAT. * With 47 major certifications , Azure has the largest compliance coverage of any cloud provider *  Azure now offers a 99.9 percent service-level agreement (SLA) commitment option on single-instance virtual machines with Premium Storage. *  When using SQL Server in Azure VM as a data source for Azure Web Apps, keep in mind that Azure Web Apps does not support Azure Virtual Network . In other words, all connections from Azure Web Apps to SQL Server VMs in Azure must go through public end points of virtual machines. This might cause some limitations for high availability and disaster recovery scenarios. For example, the client application on Azure Web Apps connecting to SQL Serve...

The figure below is a graphical representation of SQL Server availability group solution   in Azure  for HADR   consisting of the following elements: A virtual network containing multiple subnets, including a front-end and a back-end subnet Two domain controller with an Active Directory (AD) domain Two SQL Server VMs deployed to the back-end subnet and joined to the AD domain A 3-node WSFC cluster with the Node Majority quorum model An availability group with two synchronous-commit replicas of an availability database You can reduce the number of virtual machines by using a domain controller as the quorum file share witness. This would reduce the number of VMs for a two-replica availability group Related: -  Creating SQL Server 2014 Always On Availability Group in an existing Azure VNET and Active Directory instance -  SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups Listener configuration with Azure External Load Balancer

Compiled from numerous resources: Topic Azure SQL Database (PaaS) SQL Server on Azure VM (IaaS) Features Less features than box, optimized to reduce costs Features that are available only in Azure SQL Database include: • Built-in backup • Auditing and threat detection • Index advisor • Query performance insight • Elastic database pools • Manage many features through Azure portal dashboard Full box product features, optimized for the best compatibility with existing applications and for hybrid applications Performances Max 4000 DTUs in Premium Tier  (P15) Depends on VM SKU/Storage DB Size Max 4TB in Premium Tier (P11) 64TB on G-SERIES Workload Sizing by average usage Sizing based on peaks High-Availability Built-in by platform. 99.99% high-availability SLA Manual configuration by AlwaysOn AG. 99.95% HA SLA that covers just the Virtual Machines in an availability set Fault-Handling Necessary fault-handling ...

This Week I Learned - * A new tool currently in preview called the Database Experimentation Assistant , enables migrating from a lower version of SQL Server to the latest version of SQL Server. However, it is much different than the Data Migration Assistant in that the Database Experimentation Assistant provides clarity into the complexity and risks of upgrading. * Most people search for information about healthy eating during the week on a Monday, according to Google's Food Trend report for 2016. * Uber Technologies Inc., founded in 2009, is an American multinational mobile ride hail company headquartered in San Francisco, California. In the United States of America, Uber operates under the Transportation Network Company label . It develops, markets and operates the Uber mobile app, which allows consumers with smartphones to submit a trip request which is then routed to Uber drivers who use their own cars . Uber has opened in more than 300 cities on six continents. Uber sho...