Send mails with Azure Elastic Database Jobs
The DatabaseMail feature in SQL Server and Managed Instance is widely used by many professionals. But what if you want similar functionality in Azure SQL Database? There are options, but it requires a bit of tinkering. Tinkering that we gladly explain in this blog. The alternative So, you want to create something in Azure […]
The world of data is evolving
The data landscape has changed dramatically over recent years, the world of data is evolving. In the past, we mainly heard that we needed to do as much as possible “cloud-only”—but this trend has become more nuanced now. There has also been plenty of discussion about Big Data or actually the ‘Right Data’ recently. In […]
Bringing Python to Azure Data Factory with Azure Batch Service
Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a cloud-based Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) and data integration service. It allows you to create data-driven workflows for orchestrating data movement and transforming data at scale. Through a simple drag-and-drop interface the tool ensures that processes are easy to maintain. In most cases programming is not needed. In the rare situations where […]
The Databricks lifecycle and how it impacts your maintenance
Since its announcement as a first-party service on Microsoft Azure at the end of 2017, Databricks has seen a remarkable growth in usage. However, the service and its success were around long before Microsoft came into play. Going by the fact that you are reading this blog at this very moment, I’ll assume that you […]
Defining your Azure infrastructure as code with Bicep
The first thing that comes to mind when you think of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) in Azure is Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. After all, for every service – regardless of how you deploy it – an ARM template is created in the background. However, when you think of ARM, you probably also think of JSON files […]
Running Python scripts on Azure with Azure Container Instances
Contents 1. Requirements 2. Register a repository on Docker Hub 3. Create the first Azure resources 4. Building and testing the container locally 5. Creating the Azure resources for the Container Instance 6. Optional: Disable access via environment variables to key vault 7. Closing words & further reading Running Python scripts on Azure with […]
We’ve taken Azure Synapse for a spin
Microsoft has recently taken us on a word lingo with the launch of Azure Synapse Analytics. At Kohera, we’ve experienced some confusion in the market between Azure Synapse as a standalone product and Azure Synapse Analytics as a SaaS platform. We guess it’s time to set things straight once and for all, or at least […]
How to send emails with an SMTP server in Azure Databricks
A client asked if we could provide a simple form of monitoring on a part of a provided solution. The data platform we developed for them ingested a source that was afterwards used by a business team and our client’s clients. For this particular source, our client asked us to send a simple email with […]
Caching in Databricks? Yes, you can!
Sometimes, Databricks can be a bit sluggish. Especially when working with many small parquet files on Azure Data Lake. This sluggishness is often due to the security and read/write access requests that the Databricks cluster needs to maintain. This slows down the processing significantly, as the Databricks cluster reserves memory space for every I/O thread […]
XML fun on Azure SQL
For a client project I was recently asked how to efficiently handle translations in SQL Server. As, in this particular case, the client application was very proficient in processing XML data I chose in cooperation with the development team to use XML as the datatype to handle this specific case. While XML has been suitable […]
