For me, this year was an awesome year. I have done many new things. I found, that after all the Corana stuff I had to change a bit of the things I am doing. Just before Corona I tried getting into the world of the speaking. It is difficult to get involved. I have reached out to some people and together we made a first attempt to get into it. Few good fellows have helped me with this.

For a specific home project at my fathers place I needed to add data to a database which was in the cloud. The only thing was that that project could only do restfull requests. Because I played with data API Builder (DAB) quite intensive I thought about pulling up a dab server on a raspberry Pi. Of course my first attempts failed. I first wanted to run the package from the cloud straight by downloading binaries and see if that would work.

In a recent post on Linked In I announced that I have a bit a busy week. In this post I will sum up what I have done and how it worked out. DataWeekender 6.5 DataWeekender has a special place. I am volunteering there for a quite a few times. It is always a pleasure to work with the team. Somehow this year was more special for me. I was helping other speakers, but also have a session.

Now that we have DataAPIBuilder, a SQLServer in the Cloud and a web application that should be able to use Restfull API’s it is time to setup some authentication. I am not a fan of SQL Logins. Never bin and will never be. I want Azure Authentication uhh.. Entra Authentication as it is called nowadays. Making an app usefull for EntraID there are some requirements: You need to have a tenant.

In the last post we have created some more settings we need, like a Free Azure SQL Database, configured our Static Web Application to use DAB and configured User Managed Identities for as well the Database as well the Static web app. In this post we will continue. First step should be to enable the SWA to connect to the database, but it might come in handy if we also can talk from our development server to the database.

I am happy to announce that I have been selected to speak at Data Weekender 6.5. Saturday, November 4 2023 at 11:30 in track 1 I will be presenting the session named Opening up your database by API. I hope to pack in a few new items I learned recentlty about this exiting product. Next to presenting, I will be present in Track 1 the whole day to assist the other speakers.

Just a few days ago I read in an that he announced that there was a free azure database available. I am a Dutch guy. I like free. And it does fit perfectly in my dataAPI Builder stuff I am doing. Next ot the fact that I am writing this article using Github and Hugo running on Azure Static Webapp. I think this all fits in/together some how. In fact, that LinkedIn post referers now to https://learn.

Last weekend it was The-day or D-Day for me. It was the first in person event where I am presenting. My wife and I flew to Oslo from Dusseldorf. That was a breeze, sure if you know that we had the intention to take the boat from Emden to Kristiansand. See this link why… For me and my wife it looked like it had to be. When investigating traveling options end of May, we should pay only 535 for a single boat trip.

ok. I have to admit. I was not in the understanding that my preview session of last week should mean that I would not have a good presentation. As you might have read in my previous post on my sort of bad hairday, I have survived and taken action. Yesterday evening the Final of my investigation on #DataAPIBuilder was going to finalize. Or not? At least, when Brian Bonk Ruelokke contacted me to do a presentation for Microsoft Fabric – DK: Overview | LinkedIn on something new, I accepted that challenge.

Last weekend I did not post any new content to my blog nor to my linkedin profile. Reason was that I was preparing myself for a preview presentation I had today. Also, it is silly season as they call it, and there were some work requirements I needed to look at. Next to that, I am also following classes on Microsoft Fabric. I want to be prepared in Oslo, where I am speaking at September 2nd.

In my previous posts about #DataAPIbuilder I showed you how I created an environment for it. I used the Bikestores sample code which you can download from SQLServerTutorials. The source and explanation is here. I have installed that database in a VM on my desktop. That is running SQL2019 and the full stuff is downloaded from the Microsoft site. After that I configured my Visual Studio and tried to install the Nuget Package for DataApiBuilder.

API’s are usefull if you can read documentation over them, or if you can explore them. All decent API solutions deliver you something like a Swagger interface. Such an interface is helpfull if you want to find out which API is delivering you the data you want. Swagger is included in DataAPI Builder. You will find it under: HTTP http://localhost:5000/swagger/index.html HTTPS https://localhost:5001/swagger/index.html OPENAPI https://localhost:5001/api/openapi SWAGGER https://localhost:5001/swagger I encourage you NOT to use the HTTP one.

Camel C(h)asing? Last Friday I was finding out how to get the API builder installed. That was for a non programmer not that easy, but there is plenty of documentation on Microsoft Learn which is usefull. Today, I will try to build the connection to my SQL Instance which is running on premise in a VM. My NUC can do this.. It is awesome to get this done. Since I do not know what or where it should run, I just opened VSCode and start to write a Powershell like thing because I know I have to repeat some of this stuff sooner or later.

After my install yesterday, I could easily read what to do. But, Microsoft Learn is telling you something else. Where MS Learn tells you to do > dab --version I found that returned an error message: dab : The term 'dab' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

One of my friends invited me to do something on his Data Fabric usergroup Denmark in August. He wanted me to do a thing else than the Defender stuff. So I opted in for something new. I have read and seen some nice videos about a Open Source tool from Microsoft called Data API Builder. But, since it is new for me and I am eager to learn it. It is fun to do.

Well, I was in the understanding that after DataYork, I would need to “travel” to Oslo in the beginning of September… But things will end up different I understand. Just after pressing the Closing button for the DataYork user group, Sessionize contacted me that I am invited to do Data Toboggan on June 24th. Yes that is during my holidays. But, no problem. I can do! Due to rain last Thursday we drove home from Collogne.

Yesterday evening my first public speaking became a fact. Despite only a few people joined, I really enjoyed speaking. Presenting for a small number of people is really nice if it is your first time in public. I must admit, I have spoken and presented in a lot of meetings in the company, but not really in public. So it is time to go and to make some notes actionable.

While my walk to DataYork continues, I investigate various things to find out if I can simulate some of the requirements. During that discovery I find sometimes very interesting Resources. One of them is the GitHub repository from the Defender for Cloud team: GitHub – Azure/Microsoft-Defender-for-Cloud: Welcome to the Microsoft Defender for Cloud community repository This repo has a ton of information and true course on Defender for Cloud. Since Defender is part of it, some tests can be found there.

Welcom back. Yesterday I created the LAW and added a sentinel solution to it. Next to that we also configured some values which you should do. As promised I would continue my preparation today. Not to difficult but it had to be done. I have fresh Windows 11 NUC on which I do work on a daily base. The nuc is capable enough, i7 and 16 GB. So I decided to add Hyper-V to it.

Hello all. I must admit, last week I was counterproductive. There where reasons… The most influencing was the fact that my monitor died. Would not be a big problem, but I cannot work without my 43 inch IIyama.. It gives me enough room to work on various things, including my day to day work. But.. I survived. I will continue today on my journey towards #DataYork. Another thing we need to do is to create the Log Analytics workspace and add the Defender stuff to it.

When connecting to my Azure tenant, I found out that I have no uhh… active subscription created. But in another tenant I have one. So with AZ login I switched to another tenant. If you want to know how to validate some subscription stuff and related items, you can go to the CodingWithAZ.blog page: https://codingwithtaz.blog/2021/08/20/create-management-groups-and-subscriptions-with-bicep/ That page was helpful for me. I needed to have my details like billing account etc.

As people know I am publicly speaking at York User group. My chat will be about how Defender for SQL can be useful to protect your SQL data. Microsoft has delivered Defender for SQL first for cloud, but now you can also use this on premise. In this Series of Blogs I will keep you posted on how I prepare for the first speak. I have done a similar talk in my company, but I must admit, that is much easier.

This week was somewhat really exciting. A few weeks ago I opted for doing a session at the Rabobanks Internal Engineering Week conference. I had the idea to talk about how we help protecting our customers against all threads towards their databases. Initially I thought, I will do it big. Will tell everything what we know about it. Going through my documents, emails and code we have created.. I can of course find some ransomware which i can deploy to a VM running SQL… and then wait until Security comes and get me.

Yesterday I catched a note in the POD from someone looking for speakers. I took the opportunity to get in contact with him. Now it is a fact: I am speaking at Data York. My first public speaking! The subject will be Defender for SQL as part of your Defense in Depth strategy. I hope to get a lot of valuable feedforward (Yes, i need to learn from this!) from all of you!

This time I do wan to share something interesting. I am volunteering again for Dataweekender. The first time it was organized, I was moderating in Track 1. I signed up for half a day, but the fun was that great that I stayed in the track until it closed. For those of you who do not know what Dataweekeder is, it is a one day event for people who are interested in Data, data manipulation and data presentation.

As some of you know I am volunteering in Dataweekender. This event which gives you the ability to learn new things in short sessions of 50 minutes. New in this is that there are also a few tracks which have 10 minute tracks. This is mainly used by new presenters, or by experienced people who want to help you jumpstart on a specific topic. Dataweekender is having these short tracks in Track 4.