Author: jdanton1

Bye, Felicia (the one about precon payments)

One of the things I have always advocated for is for event speakers to be paid—whether directly or in the form of travel expenses. More conferences paying more speakers is good—it leads to more professionals. It allows a more diverse pool of speakers to attend events. Different conferences have different payment structures (more on that […]

Syncing Data Between Azure SQL Database and Amazon RDS SQL Server

A while back, a client, who host user-facing databases in Azure SQL Database, had a novel problem. One of their customers, had all of their infrastructure in AWS, and wanted to be able to access my client’s data in an RDS instance. There aren’t many options for doing this–replication doesn’t work with Azure SQL Database […]

Blocking .zip and .mov Top Level Domains from Office 365 Email

Last week, Google announced that they were selling domain registrations for the .zip and .mov top-level domains (TLDs). Google registered these TLDs as part of ICANN’s generic top level domain program. Spammers and threat actors everywhere have rejoiced at this notion–.zip and .mov files are very common malware vectors. While there haven’t been any real-world […]

AZ-700 Designing and Implementing Microsoft Azure Networking Solutions

One of the fun parts of working for a small-ish Microsoft Partner is that you have to take a lot of exams. Some of which aren’t in your direct comfort areas–last year I took a couple of security exams (which was mainly my own doing) and even the Cosmos DB developer exam, which was a […]

Using the Dedicated Administrator Connection with SQL Server in a Docker Container

I use a Mac (Intel, you can only run SQL Server on Edge on Apple chips) as my primary workstation. While I have a Windows VM locally, and several Azure VMs runnining Windows, I can do most of my demo, testing, and development SQL Server work locally using Azure Data Studio, sqlcmd, and SQL Server […]

How to Remove a Data Disk from an Azure VM (How not to blow your leg off)

I was working with a client recently, were we had to reconfigure storage within a VM (which is always a messy proposition). In doing so, we were adding and removing disks from the VM. this all happened mostly during a downtime window, so it wasn’t a big deal to down a VM, which is how […]