Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

December 2016 Leaderboard of Database Systems contributors on MSDN

We continue to receive encouraging comments from the community on the Leaderboard. Thank you.
Many congratulations to the top-10 contributors featured on our December leaderboard!

Olaf Helper and Alberto Morillo top the Overall and Cloud database this month. Six of this month’s Overall Top-10 (including all of the top three) featured in last month’s Overall Top-10 as well, and four others are new entrants.

The following continues to be the points hierarchy (in decreasing order of points):

For questions related to this leaderboard, please write to leaderboard-sql@microsoft.com.
Quelle: Azure

Automated Partition Management with Azure Analysis Services

Azure Analysis Services tabular models can store data in a highly-compressed, in-memory cache for optimized query performance. This provides fast user interactivity over large data sets.

Large datasets normally require table partitioning to accelerate and optimize the data-load process. Partitioning enables incremental loads, increases parallelization, and reduces memory consumption. The Tabular Object Model (TOM) serves as an API to create and manage partitions.

The Automated Partition Management for Analysis Services Tabular Models whitepaper is available for review. It describes how to use the AsPartitionProcessing TOM code sample with minimal code changes. It is intended to be generic and configuration driven.

The sample is compatible with Azure Analysis Services. The following diagram shows an example architecture.

Azure SQL Database is used for the configuration and logging database.

Azure Functions is used for execution, and can be triggered in various ways. The following list shows some of the many options available with Azure Functions.

Scheduled using a Timer function CRON expression. In this case, it is not necessary to set up a separate scheduling system.
Using a webhook request for a WebHook function, or an HTTP request for an HttpTrigger function. This allows integration with existing scheduling systems that can call a URL.
Triggered from Azure Queue using built-in integration points in Azure Functions.

Thanks to Marco Russo (SQLBI) and Bill Anton (Opifex Solutions) for their contributions to the whitepaper and code sample.
Quelle: Azure

Can blockchain secure supply chains, improve operations and solve humanitarian issues?

In my last post, I posed the question: What does identity mean in today’s physical and digital world? I was coming off the ID2020 Summit at the UN where we announced our work on blockchain self-sovereign identity. What struck me most was the magnitude of the problems identified and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about solving these already at scale problems ever since. One of the things that Microsoft thinks about when it looks at products is solving problems at scale. It is and has always been a mass market product juggernaut. Yesterday we strove for a vision of “a PC on Every Desk” and today we look to Azure, our hyperscale cloud to solve the world’s productivity problems at scale through massive compute, memory and storage workloads operating at a nice little hum in datacenters that span the globe. But I digress.

The important question is: How do we take this DNA and think about societal problems that already exist at scale? We have proven that most technology in one form or another can perform when architected for scale. But where and how do we start and then how do we penetrate with swarms of adoption to make meaningful impact on society’s greatest problems?

I started to think about where the problem space crosses the corporate and enterprise landscape. What if we can link corporate objectives directly to the problem of child labor? What if we can find businesses that might benefit from the exploitation witnessed and eliminate them? Alas, these approaches are too direct and won’t scale as first steps on this journey.

Another approach would be to look at ways we can back into solving the problems. So I began to think more indirectly about the attack surfaces that corporations operate on where there might be child labor, trafficking or other infractions. If we could identify large attack surfaces in a specific industry that might be a good starting point. This led me squarely to an industry I know very well that has been struggling to evolve ever since Amazon entered their playground: Retailers, Brands, and Ecommerce sites. The landscape gives us an unprecedented opportunity to maximize coverage via a corporate attack surface trifecta:

1. Retailers: think Macy’s, Nordstrom, Best Buy

2. Brands: think Perry Ellis, Nike, Under Armor

3. Ecommerce: Amazon, Tmall, and all of the retail.com variants like Macys.com

The one thing they all have in common is Supply Chain.

Their supply chain ends in the developed world with retail stores to shippers, truck drivers, dock and port workers and their employers. It extends back to overseas warehouses, distribution centers and all of their laborers, whether contracted, full time or part time or temporary workforce. The origin of the supply chain extends all the way back to the factory and local shippers handling the goods.

Take the case of a company like Perry Ellis that is tagging each item of clothing at the manufacturing factory, called source tagging. When a worker hangs a tag on a piece of clothing or sews an RFID tag into a pair of jeans the life of the tracked good begins. Retailers and brands have been evaluating and deploying RFID and other sensor and tracking technology in the Supply Chain and Retail stores for many years. In 2004 I built an RFID Practice at IBM Global Services. That year Walmart demanded all of its suppliers tag their products with RFID.

So, like other blockchain projects, this begs the question, why now? What is so special about this technology that lets us simultaneously add value to Macys.com and Perry Ellis while starting to chip away at one part of the un-identified, trafficked or exploited world population?

I believe the answer lies in a very subtle tweak to the existing tracking systems that are being deployed across the entire retail and ecommerce landscape. What if we could use something like RFID chips and scanners to securely and provably identify every touchpoint of every piece of product all along the supply chain? Why does that add value if we are sort of doing that already?

A little history. The reason tracking tags like RFID are being deployed by brands and retailers is to be able to effectively compete with Amazon.com. What is the single biggest competitive threat a retailer has against Amazon? The answer is a seemingly simple feature on a website:

“Buy Online, Pick up In store”

Underneath what looks like a simple ecommerce site feature lies a very big problem: Inventory Transparency. Retailers cannot effectively invoke this competitive advantage without Inventory Transparency. Retailers cannot achieve Inventory Transparency without RFID or other tracking tags.

RFID systems today simply allow you to track inventory at each waypoint in the supply chain and all the way through the retail store stockroom, floor and checkout. On any given day, you can tell in which part of your supply chain or store replenishment process your product is located. Part of the challenge is that many systems deployed today don’t do a good job providing visibility tracking all the way through the supply chain. This is partly because of siloed tracking systems and databases that live in a multitude of legal entities.

So why is it that even with all of this tracking, there is still a high percentage of lost product due to fraud?

How can a simple identity tweak improve this situation for retailers and brands while simultaneously chipping away at child exploitation?

Enter the trust protocol we call blockchain and specifically blockchain self-sovereign identity. The state change is to plug the holes in your supply chain by identifying and provably tracking every scan at a waypoint by a device or human being operating in your supply chain. This starts with the factory worker who sews the RFID tag into the jeans to the Distribution Center RFID Door reader to the employees or contractors at the DC. It extends to the entities involved, the factory owner, the Contractor that employs the DC contractors, etc. By doing this you create a closed system of verifiably known actors across the supply chain. Blockchain also lets us create a shared single ledger of truth across these independently owned waypoints, driving forward full supply chain inventory transparency. We are using this concept in a number of projects to reduce fraud in other industries. This use case meets my sniff test criteria for blockchain value in a project.

Blockchain can provide value if:

1. There is fraud or lack of trust in the system

2. There are multiple parties to a transaction

This identity tweak takes a corporate system used for tracking goods and transforms it into a system that can reduce fraud, operating costs, and product loss while simultaneously reducing reliance on exploited people, not to mention new opportunities for supply chain financing and insurance.

Should a box of Perry Ellis jeans fall out of the supply chain somewhere, it will immediately be known when it does not reach the next waypoint in the expected time. The forensic investigation will start with the prior transaction that recorded the custody of that item at the prior touch point. A blockchain identity creates the provable record of who last touched the product. This factor holds workers and contracting companies accountable. Reputation gets asserted or attested for that worker and that reputation is rolled up to the Contracting company to create a reputation score for the vendor.

The result is that Supply Chain Contractors will stop hiring unverified or reputationally attested high risk workers. This system of compliance and rating will force Supply Chain workers to be held accountable for their actions therefore reducing fraud (the corporate benefit) while simultaneously requiring a worker to register a self-sovereign identity that travels with them from job to job. This small tweak to existing RFID deployments paid for by corporations will drive undocumented workers from the system over time thus beginning the process of chipping away at the 1.5B undocumented and exploited people identified by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.9.

Is this the beginning of an opportunity to offer a “Verifiably Clean Supply Chain Certification” for brands, retailers and ecommerce sites? It is certainly achievable technically. My thesis is even if social responsibility isn’t a big enough reason, there are enough financial reasons to move forward. To this end we have launched Project Manifest and made recent announcements with partners like www.Mojix.com and ID2020.  More details in my next post.
Quelle: Azure

Failure Anomalies alert now detects dependency failures

We’ve upgraded Smart Detection – Failure Anomalies so that it monitors your web app’s outgoing dependencies and AJAX calls as well as incoming server requests. If you’re monitoring your app with Application Insights, you’ll be notified within minutes if there’s a sudden disruption or degradation in your app’s performance.

Provided your app has a certain volume of traffic, Smart Detection – Failure Anomalies configures itself. It learns your app’s usual background level of failures. It triggers an alert if the rate of failures goes above the learned pattern. The diagnostic information in the alert can help you fix the problem before most users are aware of it.

Until recently, Smart Detection monitored only failed incoming requests. (Although you can manually set alerts on a wide variety of metrics.) Now, it also monitors the failure rate of dependency calls – that is, calls that your app makes to external services such as REST APIs or SQL databases. This includes both server-side calls, and AJAX calls from the client side of your app.

Here’s a sample of an alert you might get:

This upgrade improves the chances of your finding a fault quickly, especially if it’s caused by one of the services you depend on. You’ll get the alert even if your app returns a non-failure response to your users.

By default, you get a shorter alert mail than this example, but you can switch to this detailed format by selecting “Get more diagnostics…” in Failure Anomalies rule settings:

Quelle: Azure

Announcing the availability of Clear Linux* OS in Azure Marketplace

Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of Clear Linux* OS for Intel® Architecture in Azure Marketplace. Clear Linux OS is a free, open source Linux distribution built from the ground up for cloud and data center environments and tuned to maximize the performance and value of Intel architecture.

Microsoft Azure is the first public cloud provider to offer Clear Linux, and we’re really excited about what it means for Linux users in the cloud and the community at large. Here’s a little bit more about the Clear Linux offerings in Azure Marketplace that we are announcing today:

A bare-bones VM, intended to serve as a starting point for those wanting to explore and build out a system with bundles of their choosing
A container image that includes the popular Docker container runtime, and,
A sample solution image for developing machine learning applications, pre-loaded with popular open source tools

In addition to the performance features of Clear Linux, we believe that DevOps teams will benefit from the stateless capabilities of Clear Linux in Azure. By separating the system defaults and distribution best practices from the user configuration, Clear Linux simplifies maintenance and deployment which becomes very important as infrastructure scales. This also pairs well with bundles, a powerful way of distributing software that allows for scenarios like this system update with new kernel and reboot in just a few seconds:

The availability of Clear Linux in Azure Marketplace adds more open source options to the portfolio of teams and organizations that are looking to accelerate business value and increase agility in the cloud, and it’s a testament to our continued focus on great experiences for Linux users in the hybrid cloud.

It also highlights the openness and flexibility of Azure, enabling teams to choose from a wide array of Linux and open source solutions from Marketplace, partner offerings or their own portfolio, and adding value with a rich and powerful set of cloud services, and is an important milestone of the broad collaboration between Microsoft and Intel as we worked together throughout 2016 to bring the Azure Linux Agent to Clear Linux, and collaborated in kernel and system improvements focusing on improving boot times and performance.

“Our team is delighted to have worked with Intel since day one on this project, and to bring Clear Linux to Azure Marketplace and our customers as a result of that collaboration”, said KY Srinivasan from the Enterprise Open Source Team at Microsoft.

Get started with Clear Linux in Azure today by deploying any of the images in Azure Marketplace, and checking out the Documentation on the Clear Linux site. Don’t have an Azure subscription yet? Get started with a free 30-day trial!
Quelle: Azure