Marcin Policht

Throughout recent articles published on this forum, we have described a number of security-related features built-into Azure SQL Database, including, most notably, Transparent Data Encryption, Row-Level Security, and Azure SQL Database Auditing. Their availability reflects the consistent effort by Microsoft to provide functional parity between Azure SQL Database and SQL Server instances running in Azure […]

In the past we’ve discussed the automated backup capabilities of SQL Server instances deployed to Azure virtual machines. These capabilities rely on either a dedicated Azure VM Agent extension or on system stored procedures introduced in SQL Server 2014, in order to transfer backup files directly into Azure Storage blobs. In this article, we will […]

One of the concepts that has recently been growing rapidly in popularity, in the context of cloud technologies, is DevOps. Derived from the combination of two terms – Development and Operations, it represents a new approach to building synergy between these two seemingly conflicting types of activities. The source of this conflict is the difference […]

Azure SQL Database offers a number of benefits, built into the underlying cloud infrastructure, that leverage resiliency and redundancy. You can take advantage of this functionality in order to facilitate failover and failback in response to events that affect availability of an Azure region. In this article, we will step through a procedure illustrating this […]

Microsoft and SAP share a long history of working together on a variety of interoperability solutions, including, for example, SAP Fiori and Office 365. They have been technology partners for over 20 years, with development teams co-located in their respective corporate headquarters in Redmond and Waldorf, Germany. In recent years, this trend has been exemplified […]

While Azure SQL Database offers a number of advantages inherent to its Database-as-a-Service nature, there are scenarios where capacity or functionality requirements force you to resort to an alternative approach and deploy SQL Server in an Azure virtual machine. When using this deployment option, you can take advantage of several Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features that […]

In our recent article published on this forum, we have described the steps required to facilitate interactive access to Azure SQL Database by relying on Azure Active Directory. Such an approach allows you to connect to Azure SQL Database from SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Server Data Tools, or the sqlcmd command line utility with […]

In our recent article published on this forum, we have described the principles of using Azure Active Directory to authenticate to Azure SQL Database. We also provided a high-level overview of the multi-step procedure that allows you to implement this functionality. In this article, we will focus on its specifics. A successful implementation of the […]

One of the challenges when considering migrating your on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Database is its lack of support for Active Directory-integrated authentication. Traditionally, your only option was to use SQL Server authentication. With the advent of Azure SQL Database V12, the authentication capabilities have been expanded, allowing for more flexibility that leverages […]

In many cases Azure SQL Database offers an economically and functionally viable alternative to SQL Server deployments. However, there are also scenarios where we might discover that rather than serving as a replacement, it provides synergy, working side by side with your on-premises databases. One of technologies that illustrate this paradigm is Stretch Database, introduced […]

As announced on June 1, 2016, SQL Server 2016 has reached its general availability. This means that you finally have the option to implement some of its new features in the production environment. While we still have to wait for their full support in Azure SQL Database V12, it is likely that their preview stage […]

One of the challenges associated with running your workloads in Azure SQL Database is the limited level of management oversight (when compared with databases hosted on full-fledged SQL Server instances) over its resources. While you can easily scale it vertically by changing the associated service tier and performance level, you do not have, for example, […]