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, […]
This thread on Twitter last night really piqued my interest: Looking for your Ideas – The biggest challenge at the moment is explain to traditional #ITPro audiences why upskilling in the cloud is important. How are you communicating this message w/o alienating them? Discuss. — Michael Bender (@MichaelBender) April 10, 2019 It really made […]
Yesterday, I wrote my monthly column for Redmond Magazine about dealing with situations where your management doesn’t want to invest in the resources to provide reliability for your hardware and software environment. Whether its redundant hardware and even offsite backups, many IT organizations fail at these basic tasks, because the business side of the organization […]
For a long time, CPUs and memory got faster, but we were stuck with spinning disks that topped out at 15,000 RPM. We got SSDs which were orders of magnitude faster, but we were still ultimately limited by controller throughput. NVME changes all of that. Do you know what NVME storage is? If you don’t, […]
My wife is a Type 1 diabetic, and uses a Medtronic insulin pump to maintain her blood sugar at healthy levels. While the device performs its job adequately, the surrounding software has always been a total disaster. Whether it’s requiring outdated operating systems or browsers, or the use of Java, Kelly has always had great […]
One of the cool feature additions to Azure SQL Database is Azure SQL Analytics, an additional feature that connects your Azure SQL Database to Azure Log Analytics. You can use this in conjunction with Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or Azure SQL Database Elastic Pools. Once this is configured you can see all […]
After the MVP Summit in March, I’m headed to Chicago to speak at SQL Saturday Chicago, and on Friday March 22nd, I’ll be delivering an all-day training session on the Azure Data Platform. The term data platform is somewhat of a Microsoft marketing term, but we will talk about a wide variety of topics that […]
I’ve had the good fortune to start working with LinkedIn Learning (which was formerly known as Lynda, but through acquisition became part of LinkedIn and now Microsoft), and I’ve recorded several SQL Server oriented courses there. You can find my author page here — these topics are oriented around a wide array of topics–security, concurrency, performance, […]
Recently I was writing a PowerShell script to help a customer automate the process of deploying Azure SQL Databases. One of the challenges of automation that I remember since the dawn of time, is how to secure credentials in your automation script. Back in the old UNIX days, we used permissions to protect files and […]