I have been using Octopus to deploy ARM templates for a while now and the default task that comes with Octopus to deploy doesn’t have any debugging information enabled and when you run this powershell: New-AzureRMResourceGroupDeployment If you don’t have debugging information enabled, the output of a failed deployment is basically “Deployment Failed, suck it up dude” or something along those lines. If you want to find out why your deployment failed, the best thing to do is grab your template and parameter file and run:

I have been starting to write more and more typescript lately and quite enjoying it. I have also been writing a few vsts extensions and using typescript to write vsts extensions seems to be working quite nicely. One of the best things, for me, about typescript is to use type information which gives compile time verification and intellisense. This is good but when it comes to VSTS extensions, almost every sample I have seen follows this pattern:

In the first part of this series, we looked at where to find out more information about GDPR in the UK (hint: The ICO.gov website has everything you need). In the second part, we looked at some historical enforcement action by the ICO against companies who had made a mistake with their security and data that they were responsible for. In the third part, we again looked at some different angles of opsec which have caused issues such as physical access to a server room not monitored by CCTV and how it led the RSA to a £150,000 fine.

In the last half of 2017, I decided to run a tSQLt course and went down the route of putting together a free 12-week email course. The intention was that every week students would get a bit of a description about how unit testing T-SQL using tSQLt works and a little bit of homework to ease them into writing tests both in terms of how to technically get tSQLt running but also the art of writing effective unit tests.

Re-Imagining the SSIS development environment. oooh: ahhh: SSIS is a powerful and versatile tool for extracting, transforming and loading data into or out of SQL Server. The development environment, BIDS and now SSDT allow developers to create, edit and debug SSIS package. I struggle with the actual IDE. The thing that I find is that the IDE is designed around a series of dialog boxes, tabs and a graphical map of the package as a whole.

In part three of this short series Part one is: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/GDPR-Panic-Part-1 Part two is: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/GDPR-Panic-Part-2 This is part three: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/gdpr-panic-part-3 In part two I started looking at previous enforcement action taken by the ICO, Talk Talk (3!!! times) and the historical society: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/GDPR-Panic-Part-2 In this part, we will start by looking at the Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance PLC from January 2017: Royal & Sun Alliance https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/mpns/1625635/mpn-royal-sun-al… The RSA has a data centre in Horsham, West Sussex - I only mention this as I live nearby.

Welcome GDPR friends :) Part one is: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/GDPR-Panic-Part-1 This is part two: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/GDPR-Panic-Part-2 Part three is: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/gdpr-panic-part-3 In this part, I am going to have a look at previous action the ICO has taken to give some context to the scary sounding 4% turnover or millions of pounds you will receive if you do something wrong. We obviously can’t predict exactly how an enforcement action will go, but we can think about the sort of things we should be doing, before during and after a breach.

GDPR is coming (or if you are reading this in a few weeks then gdpr is here, what do you need to know and where do you start? This post is based on how gdpr will apply to the UK. I have nothing against the EU, but in the UK it is the ICO which governs GDPR. Each country is allowed to add specific requirements, and each country does so if you are looking for how GDPR applies to another country the ICO can’t help you sorry.

I have been working with azure arm functions for quite a while and they are exceptionally useful but also quite a pain to work with, visualizing what it is that the functions will resolve to is often hard. If you haven’t used an ARM template, ARM templates are JSON documents which are effectively a whole load of properties made up of a name and a value. The value can either just be a value or it can include arm template functions.

I have had a problem with DSC in Azure Automation for a few months now, there was a change made to the xSqlServer DSC resource which meant that the paths internally were too long to be compiled on Azure Automation, I don’t even really want to think why because the fact that path lengths are an issue in 2017 (almost 2018!) makes me want to cry, so if you want to know more look at: