Azure SQL Devs’ Corner
Voices from the Azure SQL PM Team, focusing on development and developers
Latest posts
Creating a Kubernetes Application for Azure SQL Database
Creating a Kubernetes Application for Azure SQL Database Buck Woody, Principal Applied Data Scientist, Microsoft Modern application development has several challenges. From selecting a "stack" of front-end through data storage and processing from several competing standards, through ensuring the highest levels of security and performance, developers are required to ensure the application scales and performs well and is supportable on multiple platforms. For that last requirement, bundling up the application into Container technologies such as Docker and deploying multiple Containers onto the Kubernetes plat...
New Azure SQL Database free offer
We are excited to announce the public preview of the new Azure SQL Database free offer that gives you a fully featured Azure SQL serverless database with a free amount of 100,000 vCore seconds of compute and 32 GB of storage plus 32 GB of backup storage every month, for the lifetime of your subscription. This offer is available for one database per Azure subscription and is ideal for new Azure customers looking to develop for free, learn SQL, or create a proof of concept, as well as existing Azure customers that are considering adding another database. Get started today To learn more about the offer, see Az...
Generate images with Azure OpenAI Service (DALL-E) and Azure SQL Database
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 how did I create such an amazing image? Let's take a look at how you can generate images with Azure OpenAI and Azure SQL Database. Image Generation with Azure OpenAI The endpoint syntax for image generation is: And you can add some options via the request body: ...
Data API builder Now Supports ENV Files
In September, Data API builder (DAB) revved with some great new features. In this article we’ll talk about controlling environment variables with ENV files. What is Data API builder? DAB is an open source, cross-platform engine that creates instant REST & GraphQL APIs for your database - MySQL, Postgres, Cosmos DB or Microsoft SQL. Without any code, DAB uses only a JSON configuration file that explains how to access your data and what objects to expose.
Using OpenAI REST Endpoints with Azure SQL Database
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 Azure SQL Database Taking inspiration from Buck Woody's blog "Secure your AI using SQL Server Machine Learning with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Services", what can we do in Azure SQL Database if we don't have access to SQL Server Machine Learning Services? We can use External...
REST Endpoint Invocation is now Generally Available
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. With a quick call to the system stored procedure sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint, you can have data processed via an Azure Function, update a PowerBI dashboard, or even talk to Cognitive Services. In fact, just before this GA date, we enabled access to OpenAI, Azure B...
Building your own DB Copilot for Azure SQL with Azure OpenAI GPT-4
Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven exceptional capabilities in chatting with unstructured, text data. But what if we want to interact with structured data? To do so, we will need to build an LLM-powered Agent which is able to reason over structured data, in our specific case an Azure SQL DB. Luckily for us, we don’t have to build this connection from scratch. LangChain, a lightweight library which make it easy to embed and orchestrate LLMs within applications, provides a set of toolkits to make Agents capable of connecting and execute actions over external tools. In my latest article, we’ve seen how, am...
Summer 2023 Update for Azure SQL Database External REST Endpoint Invocation
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 latest set of new features are preparing it for General Availability in the near future. As a refresher, this feature makes it possible to call REST endpoints from other Azure Services from right in the Azure SQL Database. With a quick call to the system stored procedure...
How to export Azure SQL Managed Instance data into Fabric Lakehouse
If you want to perform advanced analytics on your data and create stunning reports in Power BI, you should consider using Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft Fabric is a solution that combines the best Lakehouse and Warehouse technologies to provide a scalable, secure, and cost-effective platform for data analytics. With Microsoft Fabric, you can store your data in Fabric Lakehouses or Warehouses. Both options are optimized for fast query performance and easy integration with Power BI. However, if your data is in other databases, such as Azure SQL Managed Instance, you would need to find a way to copy data into Fabric to...