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Azure Private Link now available in Preview!

With an increased security and privacy in mind Microsoft has been working on private links to Azure resources. Azure Private Link is a secure way to consume Azure Services like Azure SQL and Azure Storage using a private connection in your own VNet. This will replace the need for IaaS hosted virtual machines with SQL Server or the file server role installed.

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Azure Private Link brings Azure services inside the customer’s private VNet. The service resources can be accessed using the private IP address just like any other resource in the VNet. It is basically an NIC inside one of your VNET’s. This will allow all traffic to flow over the internal network, and will not go over the internet. There is no need to put gateways or any other network devices in place to make this happen.

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Azure Ultra Disk performance storage now available!

For very high demanding workloads, storage wise, Azure has released Ultra Disk performance tier for production use. I’ve already written about it in a previous post ( Slow IOPS in Azure VM’s? not anymore!) But now is the time to take a deeper look.

Which disk types do we have in Azure?

In the following table you can see what the difference is between all disk types in Azure. This table should help you to decide which disk to use for specific workloads.

Standard HDDStandard SSDPremium SSDUltra SSD
ScenarioBackup, Fileserver,
non-critical,
infrequent access		Webservers,
lightly used
applications and
dev/test systems		Production and
performance
workloads		IO intensive
workloads.
(SQL/Oracle/
SAP HANA)
Max disk
size		32TB32TB32TB64TB
Max
Throughput		500MiB/s750MiB/s900MiB/s2.000MiB/s
Latency8 > ms< 9 ms1 – 4 ms<1 ms
Max
IOPS		2.0006.00020.000160.000
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Azure SQL configure Azure AD user authentication (Manual)

When moving your applications to the cloud, it makes sense to start using Azure Services to get the best service, highest availability (SLA) and worry free maintenance provided by Azure. The next step is to use Azure AD identities with Azure SQL Database.

Schematic overview of Azure SQL with AAD integration, and optionally synced from on-premise AD.

Within a few steps you will have Azure AD user authentication setup.

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Azure SQL, create users and assign permissions (Manual)

This simple manual has been created to create an user in Azure SQL and assign appropriate permissions. First connect to your SQL server. Either use and AAD admin account or the SQL Admin account.

Once connected, open a New Query window and run the following command on the Master database to create the user on the server in the Master database:

 CREATE LOGIN '<Username>' WITH password='<strong-password>';

Now open again a New Query window, and select the database where you want to provision permissions to the just created user. Make sure to match the Username from the command above.

CREATE USER "<Username>";

The last step is to assign the desired role to the user. Change the value of the role, and match again the Username.

EXEC sp_addrolemember 'db_datawriter', '<Username';

This should do the trick. Let me know if you have any problems or need help.

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How to get the license key for SQL Server Reporting Services in Azure

Last week I received the question from a customer where to get the SQL license key… By default you will see the key during SQL installation, but with an Azure deployed SQL virtual machine you will never get to see the key, as its deployed from the Azure Portal.

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Retreive the key from DefaultSetup.ini

So within a few clicks you will be able to retreive the key.

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