Azure

As of today, many organizations use various Microsoft Azure services. SQL Azure databases are popular among them. Often, IT Administrators want to allow departments or vendors full access to just one specific SQL Azure database and to restrict their access to other resources. See here how this works. Use SQL Management Studio or SQL Operations Studio When working with SQL databases, installing the SQL Management Studio (SSMS) is very helpful. You can get the latest version from Download SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for free. Alternatively, you can use the new lightweight and cost free SQL Operations Studio. ...

This weekend, on the January 20th, the first SPS North Germany/Bremen took place with great sessions in a very cool location. See some snapshots here. For #SPSBRE, we had a very cool location in the Bremen Harbor at Schuppen Eins (“shed one”). When entering the former harbor storehouse building that was built in 1959, the automobile Oldtimer Boulevard hits you with more than 60 unique cars, embedded in a modernized glass structure with a cafe, shops and a garage specialized in repairing old-timers. So, we had a lot to watch – and to learn. ...

We are looking forward to see you at the SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure community event next week on January 20, at the first SharePoint Saturday North Germany 2018, in the city of Bremen. There will be a lot of interesting sessions and a great speaker’s lineup. CU there! SharePoint Saturday North Germany / Bremen 2018 Saturday, January 20, 2018 Schuppen Eins, Konsul-Smidt-Str. 22, 28215 Bremen SPS Bremen will deliver a bunch of hot topics, see speakers and sessions! We from atwork have three sessions and will inform about these topics: ...

Enabling single sign-on for your users must not be a big deal. There are multiple hybrid identity authentication scenarios available to obtain single sign-on capabilities to your users: Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS): single sign-on, based on one identity in your on-premises Active Directory and publishes on-premises and cloud web applications. This is the most complex scenario and often used by organizations with 250+ seats. They are not only using Office 365 applications for single sign-on, but also for other Intranet and Internet applications to achieve SSO user experience. Password Hash Sync (PHS): same sign-on, which means you must authenticate again with your on-premises credentials accessing Office 365 services. Pass-through authentication (PTA): single sign-on, allows your users to sign in to Azure Active Directory directly validating the users’ passwords against your on-premises Active Directory. Seamless single sign-on: single sign-on, automatically signs your users in when they are on their corporate devices connected to your corporate network. Can be combined with either PHS or PTA. When should I use AD FS instead of other hybrid authentication methods? ...

In many scenarios, public cloud services allow a high grade of elasticity, flexibility and cost effectiveness combined with standardization. On the other hand, every customer needs to build trust to the desired platform and that all his services and data are protected against any attacks. So, it’s very interesting to see, what kind of mechanisms the large cloud providers as Microsoft are using to keep data safe and how they detect attacks and what countermeasures they execute. ...

The Microsoft Graph API is the new unified endpoint for developers accessing data from an Office 365 tenant. Amongst many other features, you can work with OneDrive and SharePoint files with the Graph REST API. Additionally, you can directly work with Excel files through the Graph Excel API. Since all samples I found just use the personal OneDrive for Business (OFB) file storage, I wanted to document how to access files that are stored in a SharePoint Online site (SPO) as well. So, here we go! ...

Holidays are a good time for cleaning up. For migrating an old on-premises file storage to the cloud, I used some tools and invested some time. See my scenario and the tools here. The scenario I had a Virtual Machine (I connected to remote via RDS from my holiday location into the company) with an iSCSI storage to a NAS system where old project files were stored. This storage was used over the last years. You can imagine … the mess. To make it short: In that VM, the file storage was connected with a network drive P: (for Projects). With my work account, I have 1TB personal cloud storage. Since this should be an archive for my coworkers as well, I decided to use a SharePoint Online site (SPO). I created an Office 365 group - with a SPO for storing the documents - named “projects” and installed the OneDrive.exe client. Then, I created a new Document Library and synchronized that (empty) list to the local computer. ...

…by using a query as here: Use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or the new and cost free SQL Operations Studio to run one of the following TSQLs in the desired database: -- SQL Azure - Get statistics (rows) of all tables quickly (options summarized) -- method 1: use sys.tables -- [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/arunrakwal/2012/04/09/sql-azure-list-of-tables-with-record-count/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/arunrakwal/2012/04/09/sql-azure-list-of-tables-with-record-count/) select t.name ,s.row_count from sys.tables t join sys.dm_db_partition_stats s ON t.object_id = s.object_id and t.type_desc = 'USER_TABLE' and t.name not like '%dss%' and s.index_id = 1 -- method 2: sys.partitions Catalog View -- [https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2537/sql-server-row-count-for-all-tables-in-a-database/](https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2537/sql-server-row-count-for-all-tables-in-a-database/) SELECT QUOTENAME(SCHEMA_NAME(sOBJ.schema_id)) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sOBJ.name) AS [TableName] , SUM(sPTN.Rows) AS [RowCount] FROM sys.objects AS sOBJ INNER JOIN sys.partitions AS sPTN ON sOBJ.object_id = sPTN.object_id WHERE sOBJ.type = 'U' AND sOBJ.is_ms_shipped = 0x0 AND index_id < 2 -- 0:Heap, 1:Clustered GROUP BY sOBJ.schema_id, sOBJ.name ORDER BY [RowCount] DESC GO -- method 3: sys.dm_db_partition_stats Dynamic Management View (DMV) -- [https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2537/sql-server-row-count-for-all-tables-in-a-database/](https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2537/sql-server-row-count-for-all-tables-in-a-database/) SELECT QUOTENAME(SCHEMA_NAME(sOBJ.schema_id)) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sOBJ.name) AS [TableName] , SUM(sdmvPTNS.row_count) AS [RowCount] FROM sys.objects AS sOBJ INNER JOIN sys.dm_db_partition_stats AS sdmvPTNS ON sOBJ.object_id = sdmvPTNS.object_id WHERE sOBJ.type = 'U' AND sOBJ.is_ms_shipped = 0x0 AND sdmvPTNS.index_id < 2 GROUP BY sOBJ.schema_id, sOBJ.name ORDER BY [RowCount] DESC GO As a result, you get a list of all tables with the number of stored rows, similar as here: ...

The free eBook Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure Second Edition is available! The book was written by Michael Crump and Barry Luijbregts, The introduction starts with “why cloud” and covers app development, Azure services and ends with the Azure Marketplace. And it’s free! Get more information at the Azure blog at Free eBook – The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure now available or download it directly from aka.ms/azuredevebook. There’s a lot of current and useful information in that book and many hyperlinks to specific topics in the web. Thanks to the authors and to Microsoft for providing this free eBook. ...

BCP, the bulk copy program utility is still around - and it’s helpful! It’s a long time, since I used this tool, but nowadays it got promoted for one of my daily jobs. See a short description how to use the Microsoft Command Line Utilities with Azure SQL Database for connecting and importing and exporting data quickly. Recently, I had the request to import local data to a SQL Azure database and BCP did the job. Since the tool is handy and very fast, it’s also good for running in a script (but you need to find a solution for storing the credentials…). So, here’s an overview how to use BCP and SQLCMD as quickly as possible. ...