I wrote a couple of weeks ago, about what not to do with backups in Azure. Because I’ve seen a few improperly configured VMs lately, I wanted to talk about the way the storage works in Azure, and the way we traditionally did things on-premises. Old School If you still buy your storage from a […]
This headline may seem a little aggressive. You may think, Joey, I’ve heard you and other MVPs say that backups are the most important thing ever and I’ll get fired if I don’t have backups. That is very accurate, but when I talk about backups, I am talking about backing up your databases. If you […]
I started working on this bit of code a few months ago, and it’s served me really well. Just about every command you run against a SQL Database requires you to supply the server name and the resource group name at parameters. And in order to get the list of server names you have to […]
When Azure SQL Database Managed Instance was introduced to the public at //build a couple of years ago, it was billed as a solution to ease the migration from either on-premises or even infrastructure as a service VMs. You would get all of the benefits of a managed service like built-in high availability and patching, […]
There was a thread on one of the Microsoft MVP distribution lists the other week, about recovering from a deleted resource that reminded me of a post I had been meaning to write. In many organizations, the public cloud is the wild west of the IT organization. In the worst cases, this means organization admins […]
I try to avoid writing blog posts that I like to call “hot takes”—quick crappy opinions on the news of the day, but this is a topic I feel particularly strongly about. I’m not sure how many of you were using Microsoft’s Azure Hadoop offering HDInsight, when it debuted in the 2012-13 timeframe, but it […]
I was going to New York last weekend from my home of Philadelphia. We were running late for the train, and for the first time ever, I had a booked an award ticket on Amtrak. For reasons unbeknownst to me, you can not make changes to an award ticket on their app (I didn’t try […]
Recently I’ve run into a couple of situations where customers had lost key business data due to several factors. Whether it is ransomware, a virus, or just hardware failure, it doesn’t really matter how you lose your data, it just matters that your data is lost, and your business is now in a really bad […]
I don’t typically blog about network engineering here. However, in the last few weeks I’ve seen several major companies get hit with ransomware attacks. While this isn’t an uncommon thing in 2019, it is uncommon that their entire environments were taken offline because of it. So with that, let’s talk about how these attacks can […]
Recently, I learned something new about Azure Automation–that you could execute tasks inside of a VM. I haven’t dealt with this situation before–typically, any tasks I want to execute inside of a VM, I execute using a scheduler like SQL Agent, or the Windows scheduler. However, in this situation, we were trying to reduce costs, […]