Moving from Standard to Premium disks and back

Azure Managed Disks (introduced in February 2017) simplified the way Virtual Machine disks are managed in Azure.

A little known advantage of that resource is that it exposes its storage type, i.e. Standard vs Premium, as a simple property that can easily be changed.

Why would we do that?  Typically we’ll move from standard to premium storage to improve...

How to know where a Service is Available in Azure

Azure has a Global Footprint of 40 regions at the time of this writing (mid-September 2017).

Not all services are available in every regions.  Most aren’t in fact.  Only foundational services (e.g. storage) are available everywhere.

In order to know where a service is available, we...

Hacking: changing Cosmos DB Portal experience from Graph to SQL

In the last article, we looked at how we could access a graph using the SQL (aka DocumentDB) API.

Here we’ll explore how we can switch the Portal experience from one to the other.

Portal Experience

The Portal Experience refers to the way the portal lets us interact with Cosmos DB Data.  It’s basically the Data Explorer experience.

Here...

Hacking: accessing a graph in Cosmos DB with SQL / DocumentDB API

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed multi-model database service.

At this point in time (August 2017) there are four supported models:  DocumentDB (also named SQL because the query language is similar to T-SQL), MongoDB, Tabular & Gremlin.

We’ve seen how to use Cosmos DB with...

Cosmos DB Async Querying & Streaming

I wrote an article back in January 2015 about async querying Azure DocumentDB using the .NET SDK.

The service was still in preview back then.

Since then DocumentDB has been superseded by Azure Cosmos DB and the SDK has changed a bit so I thought I would...