One of the benefits of cloud computing is flexibility and scale—I don’t need to procure hardware or licenses as you get new customers. This flexibility and platform as a service offerings like Azure SQL Database allow a lot of flexibility in what independent software vendors or companies selling access can provide to their customers. However, […]
Author: jdanton1
A Viable Future for PASS
I have received feedback that some folks think I just want to burn PASS down, or that I don’t want a for profit company involved with a community organization. Neither of those things are remotely what I’m thinking—I’ve only been loud and writing about it here, because I want PASS to survive, which is going […]
How to Save Money with Your Azure Virtual Machine Demos
Sorry for spammy, SEO title, we got to pay the bills. Sometimes it’s fun to just write some code to solve problems, and not think about the world’s larger problems for a few hours. Last week, I learned something new from a client—that you can change managed disks in Azure in Premium Storage to Standard […]
Why I’m Not Speaking at PASS Summit and You Shouldn’t Either
If you saw any of my angry tweets last night, it’s not just because the Saints weren’t good. I’ve been writing a lot about PASS and C&C the for-profit event management firm that runs virtually all of PASS’ operation. I personally think C&C imposes a financial burden on the Microsoft Data Platform community that will […]
PASS is Untenable in its Current State
I’ve written a couple of recent posts that were extremely critical of PASS and more so C&C which is the company that manages PASS. Someone who read my last post pointed out that I probably didn’t emphasize the budget numbers I talked about enough. So let’s talk about that. I grabbed the most recent PASS […]
Distributed Availability Groups–The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I’m writing this post because I’ve been mired in configuring a bunch of distributed availability groups for a client, and while the feature is technically solid, the lack of tooling can make it a challenge to implement. Specifically, I’m implementing these distributed AGs (please don’t use the term DAG as you’ll piss off Allan Hirt, […]
How Do I Make MySQL Highly Available with Open Source Tools?
This is clickbait post title, sorry. You are here now. The correct answer is that you should purchase MySQL as a database service from your favorite cloud provider (Google, Amazon, and Azure all offer prebuilt database as a service offerings) because they have gone through the trouble of making their solution highly available. I’ll speak […]
Adding an Azure Active Directory User to Azure SQL Database with Automation
My teammate Meagan (b|t) messaged me in Teams yesterday afternoon to say “Joey, the client created a new database using your automated process, and my ETL user (which is a AAD user) didn’t get created, can you fix it?” Well, after a quick perusal of emails I remembered that I had the asked the client […]
What Do You Want Your Professional Association to Be?
I wanted to write a post about the things I think PASS does well and are foundational to the future with or without the PASS organization. Before I address that I want to speak to an ethical matter related to the new PASS Pro service offering. Every year for PASS Summit, speakers sign an agreement […]
Managing Statistics in Azure SQL Database Serverless
One of the only things platform as a service databases like Azure SQL Database do not do for you is actively manage column and index statistics. While backups, patches, and even integrity checks are built into the platform services, managing your metadata is not. Since Azure SQL Database lacks a SQL Sever Agent for scheduling, […]