Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * Azure Service Health helps you assess the health of Azure, while Azure Monitor helps you determine if there are any issues on your end. Both services use the same alerting platform to keep you notified and informed of the availability and performance of your Azure workloads. This means that you can set up an action group once and use it multiple times for different scenarios.  Azure Monitor and Azure Service Health are complementary services that you will often use together when troubleshooting issues. The Azure Status page only reports on major, widespread outages and doesn’t include any information about planned maintenance or other health advisories. * The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment -- including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications -- directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a virtual machine * PowerShell is available for .NET Core, which also runs on Lin...

OLTP systems are designed to efficiently process and store transactions, as well as query transactional data. The following table summarizes the key differences in capabilities between OLTP options in Azure : Azure SQL Database SQL Server in an Azure virtual machine Azure Database for MySQL Azure Database for PostgreSQL Is Managed Service Yes No Yes Yes Runs on Platform N/A Windows, Linux, Docker N/A N/A Programmability T-SQL, .NET, R T-SQL, .NET, R, Python T-SQL, .NET, R, Python SQL Maximum database instance size 4 TB 256 TB 1 TB 1 TB Supports capacity pools Yes Yes No No Supports clusters scale out No Yes No No Dynamic scalability (scale up) Yes No Yes Yes Temporal tables Yes Yes No No In-memory (memory-optimized) tables Yes Yes No No Columnstore support Yes Yes No No Adaptive query processing Yes Yes No No Readable secondaries Yes Yes No No Geographic replication Yes Yes No No ...

I passed the MS Certification Exam 70-473: Designing and Implementing Cloud Data Platform Solutions  yesterday I found the comprehensive list of articles & learning resources compiled by Daniel Calbimonte , helpful. The  eBook Microsoft Azure Essentials: Migrating SQL Server Databases to Azure by Carl Rabeler  [link to PDF] which is not included in that compilation is also very useful As of June 2017, this exam was updated so in addition to the above notably the topic of implementing MySQL and PostgreSQL database solutions in Azure is also covered. It is great that the quality & volume of the Azure official documentation has improved significantly over the last few years. However as there are breaking changes constantly, it is possible that there may be contradictory information (in older Azure Blog posts & the frequently revised Azure documentation) that needs to be watched out for. For instance, Active Geo-replication is now available for all t...