As December approaches, it's time for the winter 2023 update for External REST Endpoint Invocation. We have added four new Azure Service Endpoints: Bing Search, Azure Key Vault, Azure Communication Services, and Azure AI Search. Let's look at a few examples of using these new endpoints. Bing Search Endpoints Bing Seach has many useful API endpoin...

Following on the series of OpenAI posts I have done recently, here is a quick how-to on using DALL-E with External REST endpoint invocation in the Azure SQL Database. Using the OpenAI service in Azure, we can use the image generation REST endpoints to create new and wonderful images such as, if you remember, the cat in the data center. So ho...

Everyone loves OpenAI these days as it can do some amazing things. Here, I asked it to create a picture of a cat in a data center: (Go ahead and click the image to see a bigger version of this nightmare fuel) Incredible!!!! But how can we use OpenAI in real world applications and scenarios with Azure SQL Database? Using OpenAI with the Az...

On behalf of the Engineering and Product Management teams, we are happy to announce that External REST Endpoint Invocation is now GA!   What is External REST Endpoint Invocation? External REST Endpoint Invocation makes it possible for developers to call REST/GraphQL endpoints from other Azure Services from right in the Azure SQL Database....

Summer 2023 REST Endpoint Invocation Update Welcome to the Summer 2023 REST Endpoint Invocation update post! This summer, we updated the External REST Endpoints Invocation feature with a few key fixes and additions to help you use more Azure Services with your Azure SQL Database. The feature was released to public preview last year and this late...

Building on my first Azure SQL Bindings blog post and taking inspiration from Drew Skwiers-Koballa's post on SQL Bindings, we are going to create a change data stream with Azure SQL Database. Now, usually, the first part of these blogs is a prerequisite section that goes over what you need to install locally to get started. From talking to many of ...

The Azure SQL Database has two main ways to track changes with data (rows/DML) as well as table changes. One of those methods is Change Tracking with the other being Change Data Capture. Today’s post will be going into depth on Change Tracking. Change Tracking and Change Data Capture So, what’s the difference between the two? Change Data Capture ...

Transactions have to be protected and you need to know when something is altered or prevent altering of records from the start. Ledger, available in Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2022, helps to protect your database and establish trust, accuracy and integrity in your data. Ledger accomplishes this goal in a couple of ways. First, it provides...

I was fortunate enough to be able to present Data API builder the week of March 20th at VS Live in Las Vegas and what an incredible group of attendees at that conference. During my session, I stepped through a live demo of Data API builder showing off REST and GraphQL endpoints on various database objects. This blog post contains the steps I perfor...

Expanding on the excellent post by Drew Skwiers-Koballa; Developing with Azure SQL bindings and Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions, I'd like to take a chance to walk you through creating your first SQL Binding using a completely local development environment. Part 1 will cover creating a SQL Binding to get data from an Azure SQL Database. Parts ...