Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Azure Images: SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016

We’re excited to announce images for SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016 in the Azure Marketplace!

All SQL Server 2016 editions on Windows Server 2016 Data Center are available:

SQL Developer – Free full edition of SQL Server for development/testing (no production)

SQL Express – Entry level free database for lightweight workloads (1 GB memory, 10 GB storage)

SQL Web – Low-cost database for low to medium-size web applications

SQL Standard – Core Database capabilities for medium-size workloads

SQL Enterprise – Full edition of SQL Server with comprehensive capabilities for mission-critical or large transactional processing, data warehousing, and business intelligence workloads

In addition, we make BYOL versions of SQL Standard and SQL Enterprise available to easily leverage your Bring-Your-Own-License benefit.

The best thing – all our automated Portal experiences (storage configuration, optimization for a targeted workload, automated patching) work with these images.

SQL Server 2016

SQL Server 2016 is the industry-leading database platform for transactional processing and business intelligence. It’s the least vulnerable database, and has everything built-in, from advanced analytics to unparalleled in-memory performance.

Windows Server 2016

Windows Server 2016 is the cloud-ready operating system that supports your workloads while adding multiple security layers and introducing powerful storage and management capabilities.

SQL Server 2016 and Windows Server 2016 – better together

Windows Server 2016 further increases Windows Server’s performance and scalability. In addition, it introduces various features that enable new SQL Server scenarios or simplify existing ones; for example, Storage Spaces Direct, Multi-domain and Workgroup Windows Clusters, and Just-Enough Administration (JEA).

Provision a VM with SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016 today!
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft’s true hybrid cloud: consistent, not just connected

Today marked the announcement of Windows Server 2016 general availability, another milestone in Microsoft’s commitment to hybrid cloud. You can start using Windows Server 2016 today with the availability of Windows Server 2016 images in the Azure Marketplace.

Hybrid cloud is the reality for all enterprise customers we work with, even those with the most ambitious cloud plans. Some applications should and will move quickly to public cloud, while others face technological and regulatory obstacles.  As such, we’ve built-in hybrid capabilities across the Microsoft portfolio, covering data, identity, management, applications, and the infrastructure platform overall.

Figure 1: Hybrid cloud capabilities built-in across Microsoft products and services

True hybrid cloud enablement goes beyond connectivity and provides consistency. Great network connectivity and the ability to “lift and shift” virtual machines are basic requirements. Consistency goes a step further, providing IT professional, developer, and end user experiences that don’t change based on the location of the resource. Consistency across a hybrid cloud environment enables uniform development, unified dev-ops and management, common identity and security, and seamless extension of existing applications to the cloud. Consistent hybrid cloud helps customers execute on their cloud strategy faster, in a way that makes the most sense for their business.

Read more about Microsoft’s Hybrid Cloud and Windows Server 2016. 
Quelle: Azure

Simpler Azure management libraries for .NET

One C# statement to authenticate. One statement to create a virtual machine. One statement to modify an existing virtual network, etc. No more guessing about what is required vs. optional vs. non-modifiable.

https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-net/tree/Fluent

We are announcing the first developer preview release of the new, simplified Azure management libraries for .NET. Our goal is to improve the developer experience by providing a higher-level, object-oriented API, optimized for readability and writability. These libraries are built on the lower-level, request-response style auto generated clients and can run side-by-side with auto generated clients.

Azure Authentication

One statement to authenticate and choose a subscription. The Azure class is the simplest entry point for creating and interacting with Azure resources.

Azure azure = Azure.Authenticate(credFile).WithDefaultSubscription();

Create a Virtual Machine

You can create a virtual machine instance by using a Define() … Create() method chain.

Console.WriteLine("Creating a Windows VM");

var windowsVM = azure.VirtualMachines.Define("myWindowsVM")
.WithRegion(Region.US_EAST)
.WithNewResourceGroup(rgName)
.WithNewPrimaryNetwork("10.0.0.0/28")
.WithPrimaryPrivateIpAddressDynamic()
.WithNewPrimaryPublicIpAddress("mywindowsvmdns")
.WithPopularWindowsImage(KnownWindowsVirtualMachineImage.WINDOWS_SERVER_2012_R2_DATACENTER)
.WithAdminUserName("tirekicker")
.WithPassword(password)
.WithSize(VirtualMachineSizeTypes.StandardD3V2)
.Create();

Console.WriteLine("Created a Windows VM: " + windowsVM.Id);

Update a Virtual Machine

You can update a virtual machine instance by using an Update() … Apply() method chain.

windowsVM.Update()
.WithNewDataDisk(10)
.DefineNewDataDisk(dataDiskName)
.WithSizeInGB(20)
.WithCaching(CachingTypes.ReadWrite)
.Attach()
.Apply();

Management libraries unleash the power of IntelliSense in Visual Studio

Fluent interface-inspired method chains in combination with IntelliSense deliver a wizard-like developer experience by presenting required and optional methods in the right sequence. For example, once you choose a Windows virtual machine image, IntelliSense will prompt for an admin password and nothing else.

Then, IntelliSense will prompt for a password and nothing else. This will continue until you reach the minimum required to call create().

As another example, if you were to choose a Linux virtual machine image, IntelliSense would prompt for a root user name and then SSH key.

Samples

You can find plenty of sample code that illustrates key management scenarios in Azure Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Storage, Networking, Resource Manager, Key Vault and Batch …

Service

Management Scenario

Virtual Machines

Manage virtual machine

Manage availability set

List virtual machine images

Manage virtual machines using VM extensions

List virtual machine extension images

Virtual Machines – parallel execution

Create multiple virtual machines in parallel
Create multiple virtual machines with network in parallel

Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Manage virtual machine scale sets (behind an Internet facing load balancer)

Storage

Manage storage accounts

Network

Manage virtual network
Manage network interface
Manage network security group
Manage IP address
Manage Internet facing load balancers
Manage internal load balancers

Resource Groups

Manage resource groups
Manage resources
Deploy resources with ARM templates
Deploy resources with ARM templates (with progress)

Key Vault

Manage key vaults

Batch

Manage batch accounts

Give it a try

This is a developer preview that supports major parts of Azure Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Storage, Networking, Resource Manager, Key Vault and Batch. You can run the samples above or go straight to our GitHub repo.

Give it a try and let us know what do you think (via e-mail or comments below), particularly –

Usability and effectiveness of the new management libraries for .NET?
What Azure services you would like to see supported soon?
What additional scenarios should be illustrated as sample code?

The next preview version of the Azure Management Libraries for .NET is a work in-progress. We will be adding support for more Azure services and tweaking the API over the next few months.
Quelle: Azure

Temporal Tables are generally available in Azure SQL Database

Temporal Tables allow you to track the full history of data changes directly in Azure SQL Database, without the need for custom coding. With Temporal Tables you can see your data as of any point in time in the past and use declarative cleanup policy to control retention for the historical data.

When to use Temporal Tables?

Quite often you may be in the situation to ask yourself fundamental questions: How did important information look yesterday, a month ago, a year ago, etc. What changes have been made since the beginning of the year? What were the dominant trends during a specific period of time?  Without proper support in the database, however, questions like these have never been easy to answer.
Temporal Tables are designed to improve your productivity when you develop applications that work with ever-changing data and when you want to derive important insights from the changes.
Use Temporal Tables to:

Support data auditing in your applications
Analyze trends or detect anomalies over time
Easily implement slowly changing dimension pattern
Perform fine-grained row repairs in case of accidental data errors made by humans or applications

Manage historical data with easy-to-use retention policy

Keeping history of changes tends to increase database size, especially if historical data is retained for a longer period of time. Hence, retention policy for historical data is an important aspect of planning and managing the lifecycle of every temporal table.  Temporal Tables in Azure SQL Database come with an extremely easy-to-use retention mechanism. Applying retention policy is very simple: it requires users to set single parameter during the table creation or table schema change, like shown in the following example.

ALTER TABLE [WebSiteClicks]
SET
(
SYSTEM_VERSIONING = ON
(
HISTORY_TABLE = dbo. WebSiteClicks_History,
HISTORY_RETENTION_PERIOD = 3 MONTHS
)
);

You can alter retention policy at any moment and your change will be effective immediately.

Why you should consider Temporal Tables?

If you have requirements for tracking data changes, using Temporal Tables will give you multiple benefits over any custom solution. Temporal Tables will simplify every phase in the development lifecycle: object creation, schema evolution, data modification, point-in-time analysis and data aging.

Next steps

To learn how to integrate Temporal Tables in your application, read the following article with the step-by-step instructions. To utilize temporal retention, check out  Manage temporal history with retention policy article on Azure.com.
Visit Channel 9 to hear a real customer story and watch a live presentation with the demo. For more information, check out MSDN documentation.
Quelle: Azure