Azure SQL Data Warehouse

The Journey to SQL Server 2019 – where does your own journey start?

Mr. Fox SQL (Rolf Tesmer)Leave a comment

[read this post on Mr. Fox SQL blog]

A couple of weeks back I presented the keynote at SQL Server Saturday Sydney, which was an absolute blast. It was my first keynote, so honestly I wasn’t quite sure what to talk about. Now I’ve been to many seminars, conferences, etc and seen many, many key notes – and so in the end I decided to have a bit of “light-hearted” fun and simply tell a story!

So I decided to talk about SQL Server – yes, I know its exciting – but moreso about how it is that we all got to be there in that very room that morning, listening to some guy present a keynote on SQL. And most importantly how everyone else in that room had their own related personal journey with SQL Server.

And so – this journey starts all the way back in 1989; 3 great friends got together one summer and built something AMAZING; SQL Server 1.0. And it ends some 30 years and 13 versions later with SQL Server 2019 – more amazing than anyone could have imagined when they cut that code all those years before.

So sit back, reminisce, and have fun!

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Azure Service Logging in the Modern Data Warehouse

Mr. Fox SQL (Rolf Tesmer)1 Comment

[read this post on Mr. Fox SQL blog]

The “modern data platform” architecture is becoming more and more popular as organisations shift towards identifying, collecting and centralising their data assets and driving towards embracing a “data driven culture“.

Microsoft Azure has a suite of best-of-breed PaaS based services which can be plugged together by organisations wishing to create large scale Data Lake / Data Warehouse type platforms to host their critical corporate data.

When working with customers going down the Modern Data Platform path I often hear very similar questions;

  • What is the most suitable and scaleable architecture for my use case?
  • How should I logically structure my Data Lake or Data Warehouse?
  • What is the most efficient ETL/ELT tool to use?
  • How do I manage batch and streaming data simultaneously?
  • …etc

While these are all very valid questions, sorry, but that’s not what this blog is about! (one for another blog perhaps?)

In my view – what often doesn’t get enough attention up front are the critical aspects of monitoring, auditing and availability. Thankfully, these are generally not too difficult to plug-in at any point in the delivery cycle, but as like with most things in cloud there are just so many different options to consider!

So the purpose of this blog is to focus on the key areas of Azure Services Monitoring and Auditing for the Azure Modern Data Platform architecture.

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Using Elastic Query to Support SQL Spatial in Azure SQL DW

Mr. Fox SQL (Rolf Tesmer)3 Comments

[read this post on Mr. Fox SQL blog]

Recently we had a requirement to perform SQL Spatial functions on data that was stored in Azure SQL DW.  Seems simple enough as spatial has been in SQL for many years, but unfortunately, SQL Spatial functions are not natively supported in Azure SQL DW (yet)!

If interested – this is the link to the Azure Feedback feature request to make this available in Azure SQL DW – https://feedback.azure.com/forums/307516-sql-data-warehouse/suggestions/10508991-support-for-spatial-data-type

AND SO — to use spatial data in Azure SQL DW we need to look at alternative methods.  Luckily a recent new feature in Azure SQL DB  in the form of Elastic Query to Azure SQL DW now gives us the ability to perform these SQL Spatial functions on data within Azure SQL DW via a very simple method!

So the purpose of this blog is to show how to perform native SQL Spatial functions on data within Azure SQL DW.

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