From Cosmos DB to the Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool

With the announcement back at Ignite that SQL Server 2022 will have support for Synapse Link, I figured it would be a good idea to put together a quick post showing how you can use Synapse Link today, using the already-available connector for Cosmos DB as an example. I don't know if the behavior will…

Upping My Audio Quality Game

A few months ago, Anthony Nocentino discussed his Pluralsight setup. I decided that this was a good time to take advantage of a friend's knowledge and upgrade my system. Obligatory Warnings Before I get into the setup, I have to lay out some warnings. You get two classes of obligatory warning here: first, that I…

Musings on Technical Debt

On a recent episode of Shop Talk, we discussed the concept of technical debt. In this post, I want to delve into the topic a bit more and give the topic the thought it deserves. What Is Technical Debt? As developers, we throw around the term "technical debt" a lot, but I think it makes…

New Course: Securing a Data Warehouse in Azure Synapse Analytics

I have a new EC-Council course available via their CodeRed platform. The name of the course is Securing a Data Warehouse in Azure Synapse Analytics and it provides a rather detailed overview of security functionality in the product. The impetus behind this course is that Azure Synapse Analytics is a huge platform, and when it…

gRPC and .NET on Linux

Not too long ago, I attended Mark Rendle's session on gRPC in .NET. Being a bit, well, me, I decided to bring my Linux-based laptop. After all, .NET Core (and now .NET 5 and 6) supports Linux, so why not? Well, about 90 minutes into the session, I ran into a trouble that nobody else…

Another Reason to Keep CUs Up-To-Date: Replication Error 20084

I was helping out with a SQL Server upgrade recently, going from 2016 to 2019. We ran into a problem when trying to run replmerg.exe for a merge replication subscription. Specifically, we were getting error code 20084, which means that the replication process couldn't connect to one of the instances. Interestingly, the process couldn't connect…

Key Vault and Azure Synapse Analytics TokenLibrary

I ran into a really frustrating error around using Key Vault in Spark. In this post, I'll cover the issue, what causes it, and how you can correct it. The Issue: A Misleading Timeout I want to use Azure Synapse Analytics with data exfiltration protection enabled. One of the main consequences of data exfiltration protection…

Data Exfiltration Protection and Pip

Here is a warning to anybody using data exfiltration protection in Azure Synapse Analytics. Hopefully it saves you some valuable time in troubleshooting. The Setup I have an Azure Synapse Analytics workspace which uses a managed virtual network and includes data exfiltration protection. I also have a Spark pool. My goal is to import a…

Azure Synapse Analytics with Managed VNet + DEP

The Azure Synapse Analytics Managed Virtual Network If you've ever created an Azure Synapse Analytics workspace, you may recall seeing an entry about managed virtual networks. I'm pretty sure virtual networks are what we see in sci-fi movies from the '90s. The managed virtual network option means that any server resources within Azure Synapse Analytics…

Generating Sometimes-Anomalous Data

In yesterday's post, I needed to set the stage by showing how to create data following a normal distribution, or at least close enough to normal. I'll first show off the version in C# that I built for a Microsoft Cloud Workshop, and then follow up with a version in F# which shows off a…