• Azure Backup for Virtual Machines

    January 10th, 2022 in Azure, Backup, Blog

    Configuring Backups Backups are configured for each VM individually, selecting their own retention policies and routines. They can however utilise the same storage and vaults. 1. Select the Backup option under “Operations” in the sidebar of the VM management page, on https://portal.azure.com/ 2. Give your backup Vault a name, (where the backups will be stored), and select the resource group you’d like it to be in. 3.…

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  • Automate changing SSIS connection at runtime

    October 15th, 2021 in Blog, Integration Services, SQL Server, SSIS, Uncategorized

    Recently a customer came to us with an issue: “We have a primary/secondary AlwaysOn failover cluster, we want the data warehouse ETL to always pull from the secondary read-only replica. When the primary fails over, how can we detect this and repoint the ETL to the new secondary?” This led us to the following qualification steps:1. Is the secondary server accessible? a. Yes – Use it. b. No – Try the primary server.2. Is…

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  • Azure Synapse Series: What is Workload Management (part2)

    July 30th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Synapse

    So in part 1 we found out what Workload Management was and why we wanted to use it. (If you haven’t read that part, please click here and read that post before you carry on, as we’re jumping in at the deep end!) In this part we’ll be learning how to configure it. Continuing from the end of the previous post, you have two main options to configure this. First is to assign a user or role to one of the existing system defined…

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  • Azure Synapse Series: What is Workload Management (part1)

    June 10th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Synapse

    So you’ve started using Synapse SQL Pools, you’ve scaled up to improve performance, but your queries aren’t going as fast as you’d hoped. You take a look at resource utilisation and you see that as you scale up, your total resource utilisation per query goes down. But didn’t we scale up to allow our query to use more resource and run quicker? What’s going on here? A little thing called Workload Management.…

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  • Azure Synapse Series: Hash Distribution and Shuffle

    March 5th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, SQL Server, Synapse

    For this post I’m going to presume you’ve already taken a look at distributing your data using a hash column, and you’re not experiencing the performance you’re expecting. (If you’re not already aware of what this is, take a look at the following link to learn the basics of what a distributed table is and why you need it in Azure Synapse. I’ll be here when you get back.)…

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  • ADF: Where have my connections gone?

    June 12th, 2020 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Data Factory

    If you’ve been doing any development work in ADF this week you might have noticed that “Connections” has moved. But where has it gone? When you click onto “Connections” now you’ll receive the following message: Clicking this button takes you to the new Management Hub, the new fourth icon which goes alongside the existing three. Within this area you now have access to your Linked Services, Integration Runtimes…

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  • Azure Data Factory (ADF) Parent Activities don’t trigger ON ERROR OUTPUT when Child Activities Error… What happens?

    May 4th, 2020 in Azure, Blog, Data Factory

    So that title is a big question that a client of ours came across that required some additional investigation… What does happen and how do we get around it? In the below example we’ll use a simple IF Activity as our Parent Activity. To explain briefly how it functions, you provide it with a query that evaluates to either True of False. This then passes down to a set of Activities If True and a different set of Activities If False. We…

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  • System OutOfMemoryException when deploying SSIS .ispac

    February 21st, 2020 in Blog, SSIS

    If you’ve tried deploying a .ispac using the Integration Services Deployment Wizard, you may have come across the following error: By default SQL Server uses the 32-bit version of the Deployment Wizard, which is why you’ll be getting the Out of Memory error. If you instead launch the Wizard from the 64-bit location, (default is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\130\DTS\Binn\ISDeploymentWizard.exe), then you should be able to…

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