Managed identities in Microsoft Entra have simplified authentication in Azure, particularly If all of your resources are in Azure. In this basic example, I’m going to walk you through connecting a Web App (aka App Service) running an API server to an Azure SQL Database. The best part? There are no passwords involved–let’s get started ..read more

My wife and I don’t usually exchange gifts for the holidays, but this year we each got each other a piece of jewelry—well, we each picked one out, and acquired it. However, in addition to jewelry, I decided to buy my wife her own domain, and setup an email account for it. There were a ..read more

This is totally, 100% just about cycling computers, and I’m not subtweeting anything else. Product management is complex—you must balance the demands of customers, engineering teams, and people who whine on your LinkedIn posts announcing new products.  Another challenging aspect of product releases is balancing new functionality with resolving technical debt in your products. Then ..read more

You may have heard about SQL Server 2025 or SQL database on Fabric this week (hopefully, from me) even. I’m also writing another column for Redmond on some of the lower profile announcements, which is focused on networking, security, and other data changes. However, the change I’m the most happy about, didn’t even make docs ..read more

Database performance, especially in the cloud, is always a big concern. Traditionally, cloud storage has not performed as well as high-end on-premises storage. The introduction of faster cloud storage (in Azure Premium V2 and Ultra Disk, in AWS IO1-3) and VMs with more available storage bandwidth has improved overall storage performance. However, storage is only ..read more

Microsoft Fabric is touted as a software as a service platform—with a single price, providing several different modern business intelligence solutions like data lakehouse, massively parallel data warehouse, real-time analytics, and data visualization through Power BI, at for a single price. While I’d argue it’s closer to a platform as a service offering, because of ..read more

I’ve been preparing my slides for my PASS Summit precon next week, it’s called “A Day of Data Platform”, and we’re looking at a wide variety of cloud service related to data, databases, and data analytics. The first part of the training is all about cloud business models, and as I was building out that ..read more

Yesterday, I accidentally walked into a discussion on LinkedIn about the merits of Filestream in SQL Server. If you aren’t familar with Filestream, consider yourself lucky, it was a feature that was added to SQL Server in the short timeframe that people thought it was a good idea to use databases for file storage, and ..read more

I’ve recently been doing a decent amount of work with PostgreSQL database on Azure. While Postgres lacks some of the features SQL Server and Oracle has, it has the massive benefit of being free. Running it on a cloud platform does address some of those concerns–particularly around backup and handled by the platform. With the ..read more

In the last few weeks, I’ve been at several conferences, such as the MVP Summit and SQLBits, and have watched many demos. I’ve noticed a trend in the previous couple of years where presenters use more recorded demos than in the past. This trend is mainly something I’ve noticed with members of the Microsoft Fabric team, but I’ve seen others do it as well. When you do it correctly, only the keenest eyes in the room will notice that you aren’t doing live demos. When you do it poorly, everyone’s eyes quickly divert to their phones, losing the audience. Photo by Dmitry Demidov on Pexels.comWhy To R ..read more