Azure SQL Devs’ Corner
Voices from the Azure SQL PM Team, focusing on development and developers
Latest posts
Implement Change Data Streams with Azure SQL Database, Change Tracking, and Azure SQL Bindings
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 you in person and getting questions/emails on this process, this post is going to use GitHub codespaces; nothing to install locally or configure. I've created a project here that you can fork and create a codespace to get you up and running in minutes. Starting the cod...
Change Tracking in Azure SQL Database
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 provides historical change information while Change Tracking captures the fact that rows in a table were changed but doesn’t capture the data that was changed. Here is a quick look up table from the documentation: So why would I use Change Tracking over Change Da...
Using Ledger in Azure SQL Database
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 you with a history of records in your database; if a row was updated or deleted in the database, its previous value is maintained and protected in a history table. This provides you with a chronicle of all changes made to the table over time. You can even enable this f...
Make data more human with Azure OpenAI and Azure SQL
In January 2023, Microsoft announced the General Availability of the Azure OpenAI Service (AOAI), which allows Azure customers to access OpenAI models directly within their Azure subscription and with their own capacity. There are four models families available at the moment: In this post, we will see how you can use those models to query your SQL tables. The idea is that of generating SQL queries using Azure OpenAI models' API with Python code. Prerequisites Quickstart Demo The first thing we want to do is import one of our SQL tables into ...
Data API Builder Quickstart Demo from VS Live Vegas
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 performed in the demo so that you can perform them as well and create your first set of REST/GraphQL endpoints on a SQL Database. This quickstart is using 100% local components which are 100% free to use. Remember, while this quickstart uses SQL Server/Azure SQL Database, Da...
Data API builder for Azure SQL Databases – Public Preview
I am extremely happy and excited to announce the public preview of Data API builder for Azure SQL Databases. Data API builder is a new product that we are adding to the developer’s toolset to help every developer to be more efficient and effective, by instantly and securely turning Azure SQL Databases into a modern REST and GraphQL API. Turn Azure SQL databases into APIs Thanks to Data API builder, tables, views, and stored procedures objects can be turned into REST and GraphQL API instantly, so that data can be accessed using modern techniques on any platform, any language, and any device, using modern and wel...
Getting Started with Azure SQL Bindings: Part 1
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 2 and 3 will then cover inserts, updates, and deletes as well as calling stored procedures. Prerequisites and Setup Our local development environment will be using VS Code and Docker. If you don't have either installed, you can get VS Code here and Docker ...
Using Python and Azure Functions to send data from Azure SQL Database
When building applications on Azure SQL, one of the most flexible ways to send data from your database to other systems is to use Azure Functions. Azure Functions are serverless functions that can be triggered by a variety of events, including HTTP requests, timers, and Azure SQL Database changes. In this article, we will discuss how to send data from an Azure SQL Database to an FTP server and API endpoints using Azure Functions. The complete sample code for this article is available on GitHub. Get data from Azure SQL Database in Azure Functions With Azure SQL bindings for Azure Functions we can easily re...
CTEs, Views or Temp Tables?
I've just finished watching the video from the @GuyInACube about Common Table Expressions and I noticed that in several comments there was the request to explain what is the difference between Common Table Expressions, Views and Temp Tables. This is quite a common question, and it is time to give it a simple, concise, and clear answer, once and for all. Common Table Expressions You can think of a Common Table Expression (CTE) as a table subquery. A table subquery, also sometimes referred to as derived table, is a query that is used as the starting point to build another query. Like a subquery, it will exi...