I really, really miss speaking at in-person user group meetings–between the death of PASS, and the long tail of the Covid pandemic, while larger scale conferences have returned to some degree, local user groups have been extremely slow to come back in person. While some user groups are still doing remote session (I did a […]
Author: jdanton1
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 […]
Tech Field Day 26: ZPE Systems
I recently attended Tech Field Day 26, in Santa Clara, while we spent most of time with the Open Compute summit, and discussing CXL, we got to meet with hardware and software networking vendor, ZPE Systems. ZPE has a number of solutions in the edge and data center spaces that allow you to do secure […]
Understanding CXL for Servers–Tech Field Day #tfd26 at OCP Summit
Last week, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Tech Field Day 26 in San Jose. While we met with several companies, this was a bit of a special edition of Tech Field Day, and we attended the CXL Forum at the Open Compute Project conference. In case you don’t know the Open […]
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 […]
Azure SQL Managed Instance versus Amazon RDS for SQL Server—Which Should You Choose? (Or why Managed Instance is faster)
Microsoft, in conjunction with Principle Technologies recently produced a benchmark, comparing the performance of Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Amazon RDS SQL Server. I normally really dislike these benchmarks—it can be really hard to build proper comparisons and the services frequently don’t have perfect equivalent service tiers, making them really hard to ultimately compare their […]
Taking Your Azure Active Directory Security to the Next Level
What if I told you just using multi-factor authentication (MFA) wasn’t enough anymore? The Lapsus$ hacking group, who were at least partially made up of a group of teenagers in the UK, took a very targeted hacking approach. They used password stuffing to try to breach the password credentials of power users within organizations they […]
Passing AZ-104–Azure Administrator
This Monday, I took and passed the Azure Administrator exam (Az-104) exam. It was a little bit unusual for me to take this exam, as I’m already an Azure Solutions Architect, but as part of the new Microsoft partner requirements, I had to take this exam, even though it’s a subset of what’s on the […]
PREEMPTIVE_OS_FILEOPS Waits and Filestream Restores
We had a case over the weekend where our automated restore process at client got hung up on this wait type, for a single database. What was the unique characteristic about this relatively medium (2-300 GB) database? It had a lot of filestream data–it seemed like the file count wasn’t that high, but my guess […]