How-To Archives - Ballard Chalmers

Azure Data Factory (ADF) – Building Pipelines

7th November 2019
Arun Sirpal
Azure, Blog, Data, How-To

This article by Microsoft MVP Arun Sirpal discusses Azure Data Factory. With this tool, you have access to a fully managed serverless cloud data integration tool that scales on-demand. This is done by building pipelines – these data-driven workflows usually perform the following steps shown below.

Azure Logic Apps – Creating a Simple Logic App

3rd October 2019
Arun Sirpal
Application Integration, Azure, Blog, How-To

This article by Microsoft MVP Arun Sirpal discusses Azure Logic Apps and gives a demonstration of its use with Twitter.

How to Successfully Complete an Outsourced Custom Software Development Project (And Still Remain Friends) – Part One, Getting Started

12th September 2019
Andrew Chalmers
Ballard Chalmers, Blog, How-To, Project Delivery, Software Development

There are several factors that we consider the most important in successfully completing a software development project on time and in-budget. With this, we include the completed software doing what it’s supposed to do without error. And by the end of the project, everyone still remaining friends. So, we thought we would put our experiences into a blog series for you here.

How to Create a Successful Software Development Proof of Concept – For Startups

As a startup, particularly a SaaS startup, this is what it is all about. Honing the key aspects to your idea and fine-tuning it into a truly workable, outstanding and viable product is the base of your whole enterprise. You need to see if it is practical, feasible, viable and truly useful and interesting for the end-user. This is where a Proof of Concept (POC) comes in.

The Query Store – SQL Server

23rd July 2019
Arun Sirpal
Blog, Data, How-To, SQL Server

The Query Store was introduced back in SQL Server 2016 and with the incoming release of SQL Server 2019, it remains a very important feature to know and understand to utilise in performance tuning exercises. Not only is this feature available with on-premises SQL Server but it is a key tool to use when troubleshooting performance issues in Azure SQL Database.

Modern Serverless Development Part 8 – Monitoring with Azure Monitor

8th May 2019
BC Technical Team
Azure, Blog, How-To, Software Development

One of the real benefits of using Azure for Serverless work is not having to think about scaling for the most part, but there are times when you want to ensure that your costs do not become too high. For example, function calls may be running reports against a SQL Database...

Modern Serverless Development Part 7 – Automated Environment Deployment Using Azure Resource Manager

26th March 2019
BC Technical Team
Azure, Blog, How-To

One of the real benefits of using Azure for Serverless work is not having to think about scaling for the most part, but there are times when you want to ensure that your costs do not become too high. For example, function calls may be running reports against a SQL Database...

Throttling Calls to Azure Functions from Azure Service Bus

7th February 2019
BC Technical Team
Azure, Blog, How-To

One of the real benefits of using Azure for Serverless work is not having to think about scaling for the most part, but there are times when you want to ensure that your costs do not become too high. For example, function calls may be running reports against a SQL Database...

Diagnosing Azure Cosmos DB High Resource Unit Spikes

25th January 2019
BC Technical Team
Azure, Blog, How-To

We encountered a recent issue where we were seeing the Resource Units (RUs) in a test environment spiking even under relatively low load of 3-4 users. As this was due to scale to a lot more users...

Modern Serverless Development Part 6 – Deploying with Azure DevOps

15th January 2019
BC Technical Team
Azure, Blog, How-To

Having worked with the Microsoft incarnations of Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online, Azure DevOps is a real culmination of an evolving product to become essential for any Azure Developers. The ability to use in a simple or complex way depending on your needs and all in one place removes the need to...