A couple weeks back, Oracle and Microsoft announced their cross-cloud partnership. This was wonderful news to me, as I’ve been working on numerous Oracle projects at Microsoft with Azure. The Gist To know that there is now a partnership between the two clouds and that there’s also a large amount of documentation about working between the two clouds is very helpful vs. the amount I’ve been working on based off just my knowledge. Just as anyone appreciates a second set of eyes, I now have two company’s worth! If you missed the announcement and curious what it’s about, Oracle has…
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Hard to believe its been one year, but it was June, 2018 when I joined the unstoppable company known as Microsoft. All-in Analytics I joined, with the expectation that I would leave much of what I had specialized in behind me- Oracle, along with other non-Microsoft database platforms, Linux, optimization and DevOps. I was excited to start my journey in business intelligence. Power BI was already starting to take over the world. I’d noticed the patterns, having only arrived on the BI scene in 2015, it was encompassing a larger percentage of speaker sessions and focus of content on the…
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In the previous blog posts, we learned how to set up the first part of a standard shell script- how to interactively set variables, including how to pass them as part of the script execution. In this next step, we’ll use those to build out Azure resources. If you’re working on-premises, you can use this type of scripting with SQL Server 2019 Linux but will need to use CLI commands and SQLCMD. I will cover this in later posts, but honestly, the cloud makes deployment quicker for any business to get what they need deployed and with the amount of…
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Almost every Linux or Unix person has seen the help forum post from a novice looking for an answer to a frustrating problem and the arrogant fool that responds with “Just type in rm -rf / and it will fix the problem.” For anyone who is part of the “do no harm” technical community, this can make us wish for a way to revoke the arrogant fool’s privileges to the internet— permanently. Recycling Commands This leads me to a great post from Carlos Robles this last week on using aliases with docker commands. As with many command line utilities, certain…
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Hello from Atlanta, where I’m preparing for tomorrow’s SQL Saturday and arrived for the great news announcing this year’s PASS Summit 2019 Learning Pathways. These sessions are two or more sessions to provide a more complete learning opportunity for the attendee. I’ll be part of two of these pathways: Technical Leadership: Becoming a Technical Leader with Denise McInerney Linux for SQL Server Professionals: Empowering the SQL Professional with Linux Scripting I’m looking forward both to the first, a leadership talk, as we rarely see a focus on how to forge a path in a technical career without often sacrificing our…
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In Part I, we started with some scripting basics, as in, how to write a script. This included the concepts of breaking a script into sections, (introduction, body and conclusion) For Part II, we’ll start with the BASH script “introduction”. The introduction in a BASH script should begin the same in all scripts. Set the shell to be used for the script Set the response to failure on any steps, (exit or ignore) Add in a step for testing, but comment out or remove when in production For our scripts, we’ll keep to the BASH format that is used by…
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Many see scripting as a science, but if you want to write not just functional scripts, but efficient and easy to work with scripts, it is also an art. Most SQL DBAs are feeling the pressure to learn BASH as they enter Azure and I strongly recommend it. I’m learning PowerShell as part of my education coming from a Linux background to Azure. It’s all about “the more you know”….you know? So let’s start with learning it right. Scripts = Stories A good script has the following parts to it: An Introduction A Body A Conclusion We’re going to focus…
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I do a LOT of scripting. Given the choice to click in a GUI vs. typing at the command line, I’ll choose the command line. Given the choice to type commands in repeatedly vs. scripting out a task I perform more than twice, I’ll script. Scripting effectively is an art as much as it’s a science. Where a GUI can change, both in content, as well as layout, a script is less impacted by this when it is designed to dynamically work with the catalog. You have the choice to either work with the values in an array or to…
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Azure Directory is available with Linux SQL Server 2019 in Preview and as I was setting it up in my Azure environment on a Linux Red Hat 7.3 VM, I was, as many are, happy that they list the commands for the Azure CLI to set up authentication with Azure Directory, but was concerned, that with so many new to Linux, that they didn’t describe in the steps WHY we were running certain commands or setting best practices around Linux database server design. The setup expects that you already have a Linux VM and SQL 2019 already up and running.…
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There are busy times for everyone and if you speak at conferences, the busy times are March,May and November. I am recovering from the early spring rush, and now it’s time to prepare for the late spring one. I’ve been fortunate enough to be accepted to speak at the following regional SQL Saturdays and look forward to speaking and meeting new folks, along with catching up with conference friends: SQL Saturday Raleigh, April 27th Optimizing Power BI, Taming of the Shrew, (Analytics) SQL Saturday Jacksonville, May 5th GDPR, The Buck Stops Here, (data governance) Be a Part of the Solution…
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Thanks to those that attended of the over 1600 registrations for the Microsoft webinar yesterday on the future of the DBA in the Cloud. This was a fun session for me, as I got to demo one of my favorite skill areas since starting at Microsoft- automation of cloud deployments in Azure. Bash’in it Its natural that others would be doing this, but I’m writing all my main scripts in BASH, which prepares the environments, calls the Azure CLI commands and then other scripts, (Power Shell, Json Templates, etc.) from the main “wrapper” script. I’m also deploying, not only the…
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This is the third in a series of product identifications between Oracle and Microsoft to assist those attempting to understand the similarities and differences between these essential parts of any data platform environments. In this post, I’m going to describe the similarities and differences between Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services and Oracle Golden Gate. Hang on, it’s a bit of a bumpy ride. as neither service is out there on its own, (other’s piggy back off of them) and there’s definitely some new products on the Microsoft side that aren’t taken into consideration. The first thing to know is that…
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There are a lot of DBAs that are expected to manage both Oracle and MSSQL environments. This is only going to become more common as database platforms variations with the introduction of the cloud continue. A database is a database in our management’s world and we’re expected to understand it all. Its not an easy topic, but I’m going to post on it, taking it step by step and hopefully the diagrams will help. Its also not an apple to apple comparison, so hopefully, but starting at the base and working my way into it with as similar as comparisons…
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Yep, still doing a lot of database migrations. Just too many people wanting to migrate their other database platforms over to Azure… I have two customers that have DB2 databases and I know how overwhelming it can be to take on a project like this, so I thought I would go over the high level steps to this project to demonstrate it’s a lot easier than many first may believe. The SQL Server Migration Assistant is your friend and can take a lot of the hardship out of migration projects. The overall steps to the migration are as follows: Questions…
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I’m curious by nature and many have shown interest when I connect Power BI to the SQL Profiler to collect performance information, but if you can do that, what happens when you connect it to the SQL Server Management Studio, (SSMS)? That can seem quite foreign, but if you can connect it to the SQL Profiler, you can connect it to the SSMS. Why you can do this is clearly understood when you begin to look underneath the covers of the PBIX file and the processes that run from your desktop. The PBIX File All Power BI files end with…
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Using only what you need in Azure is a crucial part of optimizing your environment in the cloud. You find that as attractive as Azure is for the masses, making this change to make sure what you do use is optimal will make it downright irresistible. Many customers, as they are ramping up with Azure Data Factory, (ADF) didn’t worry too much as they built out pipelines, as they could always pause the service at the resource level. In recent weeks this feature has been deprecated and customers may be at a loss as to how to proceed. The best…
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As I live in an RV and travel as part of my work and to attend events, travel has started to figure out that I often fly out of one location and fly back into another. This week will be no different. Since we travel between cities on the weekend, its bound to happen that I leave for a SQL Saturday on a Friday in one city and arrive back in a different city on a Sunday. This Friday I will fly out of New Orleans, LA airport, only to fly in on Sunday to a small airport outside of…
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DevOps deployments and automation have numerous tools at their disposal, but most often, scripting is required. Although I’m a Microsoft Azure fanatic, I am also a strong advocate of Linux and with my two decades on Unix, I strongly prefer BASH over PoSH. I find the maturity of BASH and KSH highly attractive over PoSH and with my experience, I’m simply more skilled with shells native to the Linux OS. Before we get too far in, I know some of the text can be difficult to read and/or you want to copy and paste or you want some of the…