Web application releases are a scary affair and, depending on the criticality of your system, you may need to put yourself in a position where changes, such as a SQL Server database upgrades, can be rolled back immediately. Fortunately, when using Azure DevOps, it's easier to do then you may think...
Is it just me or is British Summer Time (BST) AKA Daylight Saving Time (DST) an utterly pointless endeavour these days? Admittedly, on its introduction in 1916, it fulfilled a sensible objective - to provide more daylight hours during the summer. For agricultural, construction or other services that are reliant on sufficient light to carry [...]
When it comes to handling large datasets in a formal, structured and highly scalable manner, nothing beats SQL Server. Having worked with the product for almost six years, I always look forward to the opportunity of putting together some SQL queries or to build out a new database. I think of it as a nice [...]
When considering whether or not to shift your existing SQL workloads to a single database offering on Azure SQL, one of the major pros is the breadth of capabilities the service can offer when compared with other vendors or in comparison to SQL Server on an Azure Virtual Machine. A list of these may include: [...]
If you are looking for an easy-to-use and highly expandable mail relay service, SendGrid represents the most developer-friendly solution out in the market today. What's even better is that it's available on Azure, making it the ideal choice if you are developing an existing solution on the Azure stack. The best thing I like about [...]
Microsoft Flow is a tool that I increasingly have to bring front and centre when considering how to straightforwardly accommodate certain business requirements. The problem I have had with it, at times, is that there are often some notable caveats when attempting to achieve something that looks relatively simple from the outset. A good example [...]
The world of database security and protection can be a difficult path to tread at times. I often find myself having to adopt a "tin-foil hat" approach, obsessing over the smallest potential vulnerability that a database could be compromised with. This thought process can be considered easy compared with any protective steps that need to [...]
Perhaps one of the most useful features at your disposal when working with Azure SQL Databases is the ability to integrate your Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) login accounts, a la Windows Authentication for on-premise SQL Server. There are numerous benefits in shifting away from SQL Server-only user accounts in favour of Azure AD: Ensures consistent login identities [...]
When you have spent any length of time working with Dynamics CRM Online/Dynamics 365 for Enterprise (D365E) data programmatically, you become accustomed to how Option Set, State and Status Reason values are presented to you in code. To explain, the application does not store your Option Set value display names within the SQL Server Entity [...]
Although CRM Online/Dynamics 365 for Enterprise (D365E) does provide a plethora of different tools aimed at satisfying reporting requirements for users of the application, you are restricted in how data can be queried within the application. For example, you cannot just connect straight up to the applications SQL database and start writing stored procedures that perform complex [...]