>> You might have heard of Azure Blob Storage but what
is it and what can you use it for and how do you get started?
Learn all about it this week on Data Exposed MVP Edition
[MUSIC]
Hi I'm Anna Hoffman
and welcome to this episode of Data Exposed MVP Edition.
Today I'm joined by Indira an MVP in New Zealand I believe.
Indira why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself
>> Hi my name is Indira and I have been in
the Data space for almost 20 years now working on SQL Server,
business intelligence, no mode on Azure and in
my pastime I actually do teach kids all about SQL and Power BI.
I have been doing that since 2016 and I think that's what got me
the MVP award from Microsoft so that's a brief about me.
>> Awesome. Cool. We were excited
to have you on the show and I also think it's really
cool that you're teaching
the next generation all about SQL and Power BI.
But today we are going to be talking about Azure Blob Storage and
surprising to some of our viewers this isn't something we've
ever talked about on the show before.
I'd love to kick it off before you tell us all about it.
Can you tell us why should a data person,
a SQL Server or Azure SQL whatever person care about
Azure Blob Storage and then yeah let's learn all about it.
>> I'll keep this very brief.
The main reason why SQL Server people should
care about Blob Storage is SQL Server mostly deals with
structured data but with
Azure Blob Storage we can store all the unstructured data
breach which means the media files and documents,
the PowerPoint, the Word documents and
**** files all files can be stored in the Blob storage.
>> Cool.
>> Shall I get started.
>> Yeah. Let's learn all about it.
>> First, today's agenda is we will learn a bit about
what Azure Blob Storage is and I will do a quick demo.
As I mentioned Azure Blob Storage is a Microsoft
provided service on Azure and then it is
used for storing different documents and that's why it is called
Blob which is large objects and we can store
large objects which are
unstructured and they are stored as text or binary.
Blob Storage is designed as you can see on
the screen serving images or documents directly to a browser,
storing files for distributed access,
streaming video and audio and writing to log file,
storing data for backup restore
disaster recovery and archiving and also
storing data for analysis by
an on-premise or Azure hosted service.
Blob Storage offers three types
of resources which is the storage account,
Container in the storage account and a Blob in a Container.
What exactly I mean by this is you have three roles.
For example I am a user,
I'm Sally let's say and I have
these large number of files that I need to store like pictures,
movies and so that's why I create a Container to store
those images or movies or
whatever documents that I want to share and what I want to store.
It also provides a secure way to store all your pictures and
movies and all the large objects are stored in a Blob.
What I mean by it is if you have lot of
documents you can upload them
into a Container and because you are the user,
the account will be owned by you and you can
share these resources by
using rest APIs or Powershell
or command line interface or even certain libraries from.NET.
All these can be accessed using those things.
>> Before we get into a demo because
I sought out of my agenda I'm excited about it.
Quick question, when we say Container
like super familiar with Containers
but this isn't a small hosted Container that people think of.
This is more like a folder or can you explain a little more?
>> Yeah. It is a folder. Once you create Azure Blob Storage on
the Azure portal you can also
access using what is called a small tool called Storage Explorer.
You can connect your subscription to
the Storage Explorer and then it will be
like a folder structure like how you have Windows Explorer.
You can use that. You can use
a familiar structure to access those.
>> Nice. Let's take a look at what you have.
>> I'm logging into the portal with
my Login credentials and
and here is the portal that you can see.
Now in the portal
the storage accounts are available as a resource.
In order to create a resource,
click on Create Resource and search for Storage Account.
Once the Storage Account pops up then you can click on
it and choose the green one which is the Storage Account.
Once you choose the Storage Account you can just hit on
Create and here you can see a lot of tabs.
Choose the subscription first and
also I prefer creating a new resource so
that when you want
to delete you can just delete the resource group.
I'm creating a new resource group
and you can also name the Storage Account name.
I'm just giving D because Data Exposed.
It also makes shows that it is unique.
Then you can choose the region because
I'm from New Zealand and the New Zealand Datacenter
is not yet there so I'm using Australia East and also here
performance is either standard or premium.
I just use the standard and there are
different local redundancy storage,
Geo-redundant all those things so just
choose the Geo-redundant for starting access and
make read access I just did that and then click the Next and in
the advanced step you have the security where
you can define so require security transport forest APIs.
If you don't want you can untick those I'm just keeping
everything normal and you can use the TLS version.
The latest version is 1.2.
If you want limited scope
for copy operations you can change those as well.
I'm just keeping the defaults and
now network access at the moment I just put
the enable public access but
you can give private access only and
then based on what you are sharing,
you can do this thing and then you
can put the data protection as well,
which will define your sensitive information
and also tracking if you want to
track who is accessing
that also you can do that and
encryption type also you can mention.
I'm not mentioning anything I'm just
using the defaults and you can
add tags as well for search.
Then you can review
all your configuration and then you can hit Create.
That takes about a couple of minutes.
Once your deployment is complete you will get a notification and
also you can hit on the Go To Resource.
Here you will get an overview of all your conservation that you
have created and if
you want to change you can change from there itself.
There are different tabs.
The monitoring tab will give you the what to ingress and egress.
All the capabilities you can use
the Blob Storage to create a static website,
lifecycle management all these things.
You can secure data via private endpoints and things like that.
Also Azure gives you
recommendations whether it is using Azure best practices
or not and based on that you can cut it to
your Azure Blob storage configuration.
You can use the client libraries from different.
Here I have mentioned the Container.
Here in the Data Storage section you have the Containers.
You can add a Container like how I have mentioned.
I'm just naming the Container as D Container 1.
You can specify the access level as well private
anonymous or Container anonymous and then Blob anonymous.
You can do that and in
the advanced section you
can do the encryption configuration as well.
I'm just keeping the thing as it is.
The Container is created just a couple of seconds.
This is the Container and this is where you can upload your file.
I'm just uploading a media file
and you can tick Override if you want to.
Then you can access it.
I will show you the access as well, how to access.
I'm just going to upload one more file which is a Word file.
Just uploads very quickly and now for you to access you just
click on the document that you want to
access and if you try the URL copy,
the URL and tried to access that you will
not have access because it is secure.
You need to generate a SAS token so
that's what I will show you now.
If you come down there is a generate SAS.
You can just click on that if you want
HTTPS and HTTP you can choose that as well.
If you choose the Blob SAS token only even then you cannot access.
But you need to choose
the Blob Storage URL only then you will be able to access,
which I think I'm going to show you a little bit.
Just go again and then copy
the Blob SAS URL and now it downloads for you.
The document is downloaded.
That's about it that I have for the demo.
>> Nice cool that was super useful to see into
and how you get this thing to deploy all the different options.
Also pretty interesting how
there's a lot of overlap in the different categories.
A lot of those things looked familiar to what you
would see when you're deploying something like Azure SQL database.
Then to see in action the Containers and the Blobs you
were mentioning about just founded super-useful so Indira,
thanks so much for coming on the show.
Any final tips or tricks for
folks who are just getting started with this?
>> Just getting started I think you should start
exploring and then see what works and what does not work.
There are a lot of media out there who are blogging and
vlogging and also Microsoft Learn
provides a very good documentation which you
can start using it straight away.
So that's my tip.
>> Cool. Thanks so much Indira for coming on the show.
I learned a lot, I know our viewers learn a lot as well.
To our viewers if you like this episode go ahead
give it a like let us know what you think
of this episode follow the links in
the description to learn more and we hope to
see you next time on Data Exposed. [MUSIC]