Showing all posts tagged: 'Azure'

A 66-post collection

Working with Azure Blobs through the .NET SDK

Azure is my cloud of choice. Not only because you get free stuff, yes you do, but also because of the flexibility and ease of interacting with it. If you don’t have an Azure account, you can register for free here. One of the features offered by Azure is Storage. There are 3 types of Storage: Blobs: used to store files, images, binary data, or video Drives: which can be mount on VMs etc like an external drive but virtual Tables: scalable structured storage which acts like a database table but with slightly different behaviour and structured. You can …[read more]

My thoughts on TechEd 2014 announcements

Are you following this? Are you watching the videos? I think Channel9, the official Microsoft media outlet, died from overwhelming demand. The cynics may say that this is because of technical issues, however, I say that this is due to a highly demanding audience :). If you have been unable to watch the live stream, rest assured that all recordings will be available online soon (usually withing 48hrs). It's only been a month since the //Build event where Microsoft announced a host of new features, open sourced their new Roslyn compiler, and brought the mobile, desktop and gaming platforms together under …[read more]

Configuring SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in Azure - Part 3

This is the last of the 3 part blog series where I will explain how to setup Always On using primarily PowerShell and a little bit of GUI. In this section we discuss how to setup and test the Always On SQL Server functionality Prerequisites### You have already completed Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. Part 3 - Prepare the cluster nodes for Always On### You can simply copy paste the code below and execute it step by step in order to implement Part 3 ########################################################## #Step: 1 #Description: Start an Azure PowerShell session # Or start an elevated PowerShell …[read more]

Backing up SQL Server to Azure Storage account using T-SQL

One of the cool things of SQL Server 2012, is the ability to backup any database to Azure. This frees DBA’s from having to maintain tapes for offsite backups. Think of it as your Disaster Recovery on the cheap (and easy) The setup is incredibly simple and I would urge you to take advantage of this feature as soon as possible. If you don’t have an Azure account, you can get one here In order to be able to backup to Azure, you need to configure a credential to store the Windows Azure Storage authentication details. You can …[read more]

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups – Issue with preferred replica for log backups

Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to customize Ola Hallegren’s script in order to perform backups on an Always On Availability Group running on Azure (blog to follow soon)[1]. I managed to get everything working apart from the Log Backups and the culprit was fairly easy to find. In Ola’s DatabaseBackup stored proc, there is a section of code that checks whether the specified backup type (full, diff, log) can run on the current server as per below: IF @Version >= 11 AND @Cluster IS NOT NULL BEGIN SELECT @CurrentAvailabilityGroup = availability_groups.name, …[read more]

Copying VHDs between private storage accounts

If you ever need to copy VHDs between two different storage account, you can use the PowerShell script below to do it in few steps: Perform the copy Firstly select the subscription you need to work with. Select-AzureSubscription "MySubscriptionName" Define the source VHD - authenticated container. You can get the vhd name and url from the portal $srcUri = "https://mysubscription.blob.core.windows.net/vhds/yourvhdname.vhd" Define the source Storage Account. This is where the vhd is currently located. The Private key can be acquired from the azure portal $srcStorageAccount = "sourceStorageAccount" $srcStorageKey = " …[read more]

Configuring custom domains for Azure Website

First off, if you don't have an Azure account, go get one! You get 10 websites for free plus a whole lot of goodies for free. I recently deployed a new site and I wanted to point a custom domain to it. However, the available documentation wasn't particularly clear. There are two ways to have a custom domain pointing to an Azure website, using A Records and CName records, but I wasn't sure if I needed both or just one etc and I wanted to use A records. This had me looking for a bit but thanks to a post …[read more]

Configure Database Mail on SQL Server Azure VM using T-SQL

Emails are an integral part for any SQL Administrator who wishes to stay on top of thins. Emails can be used to send alerts on job failures, run and report on diagnostics or return a query result set that your users may be interested in. Today we will look on how to configure SQL Server to send emails from an Azure VM. However, there is little to no difference between this configuration and an on premise SQL Server. However, Azure doesn't offer smtp servers by default so you have to use a third party provider. For this example, we will …[read more]