Last month, I had the pleasure of attending Cloud Field Day 17 in Boston. If you aren’t familiar with the Tech Field Day events, a bunch of independent technology experts get to meet with a wide array of technology companies. This allows the companies to tell us about their offerings, and we give them feedback […]
Author: jdanton1
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 […]
The Importance of In-Person User Group Meetings
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 […]
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 […]