All other questions and answers I have found on this topic reference accessing a CSV/Excel file (e.g. via OPENROWSET or BULK INSERT) rather than as a blob.
Is it possible, from within a Stored Procedure, to access Azure Blob Storage (for a particular, known file URL), and output the actual file's data as a varbinary(max) column from a stored procedure? Similarly, in reverse, is it possible to accept a varbinary(max) as a stored procedure parameter and subsequently write that file to Blob Storage from within Azure SQL Database?
My first reaction would be: why would you?
If there's a reason to combine data from SQL with data from a file, your logic should probably do that. Use tools and services for what they're there for, and what they're good at. Reading (information from) files from within (Azure) SQL is not one of them.
With that being said: it does not seem possible without OPENROWSET or BULK INSERT.
Closest that is out there is an option to SQL Server backup to URL for Microsoft Azure Blob Storage but even that's only available for SQL Server and Managed Instance. The fact even that is not possible with Azure SQL probably tells us something like this is not going to possible.
Related
I'm looking for solution to store a file in Azure Storage Account - File Share from a Stored Procedure. I'm not using this file content in my tables, it's all photo references. Could you please suggest me if any of these approaches would help or any other alternatives?
Calling Azure Serverless Functions from the Stored Procedure
Accessing the Physical Path from Stored Procedure, like using “CREATE EXTERNAL DATA SOURCE” command.
Calling xp_cmd to store the files.
Thanks in advance.
Azure SQL database doesn't support access local files, and only support Blob storage. That's why those approaches don't work.
Just for now, we can not find any supports for the file storage. You may could add a new feedback that Azure SQL database product team could see it.
My company has a SQL Server database which they would like to populate with data from a hierarchical database (as opposed to relational). I have already written a .net application to map its schema to a relational database and have successfully done that. However my problem is that the tech being used here is so old that I see no obvious way of data transfer.
However, I have certain ideas about how I can do this. This involves having to write file scans in my unconventional database and dump out files as csv. Then do a bulk upload into SQL Server. I do not appreciate this as there is the element of invalid data involved which terminates the bulk upload quite so often.
I was hoping to explore options around service broker. I was hoping to dump out live transactions where a record has changed in my database and then this can somehow be picked up?
Secondly I was also hoping to use something which if I dump out live or changed records in a file (I can format the file to whatever format is needed), can something suck it into SQL Server?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Waqar
Service Broker is a very powerful queue/messaging management system. I am not sure why you want to use it for this.
You can set up an SSIS job that keeps checking a folder for csv files and when detects a new one it reads it into SQL Server and then zips it and archives it somewhere else. This is very common. SSIS can then either process the data (its a wonderful ETL tool) or invoke procedures in SQL Server to process the data. SSIS is very fast and is rarely overwhelmed so why would you use Service Broker?
If its IMS (mainframe) type data you have to convert it to flat tables and then as csv type text tables for SQL Server to read.
SQL server is very good at processing XML and, as of 2016, JSON shaped data, so if that is your data type you can directly import into SQL Server.
Skip bulk insert. The SQL Server xml data type lends itself to doing what you're doing. If you can output data from your other system into an XML format, you can push that XML directly into an argument for a stored procedure.
After that, you can use the functions for the XML type to iterate through the data as needed.
Is there a way to output U-SQL results directly to a SQL DB such as Azure SQL DB? Couldn't find much about that.
Thanks!
U-SQL only currently outputs to files or internal tables (ie tables within ADLA databases), but you have a couple of options. Azure SQL Database has recently gained the ability to load files from Azure Blob Storage using either BULK INSERT or OPENROWSET, so you could try that. This article shows the syntax and gives a reminder that:
Azure Blob storage containers with public blobs or public containers
access permissions are not currently supported.
wasb://<BlobContainerName>#<StorageAccountName>.blob.core.windows.net/yourFolder/yourFile.txt
BULK INSERT and OPENROWSET with Azure Blob Storage is shown here:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlserverstorageengine/2017/02/23/loading-files-from-azure-blob-storage-into-azure-sql-database/
You could also use Azure Data Factory (ADF). Its Copy Activity could load the data from Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) to an Azure SQL Database in two steps:
execute U-SQL script which creates output files in ADLS (internal tables are not currently supported as a source in ADF)
move the data from ADLS to Azure SQL Database
As a final option, if your data is likely to get into larger volumes (ie Terabytes (TB) then you could use Azure SQL Data Warehouse which supports Polybase. Polybase now supports both Azure Blob Storage and ADLS as a source.
Perhaps if you can tell us a bit more about your process we can refine which of these options is most suitable for you.
I'm extremely confused, so I've created an SQL Database in Windows Azure, created a "video table" with a "video_file" column as "varbinary(max)" because I want to upload a video file into that field, however Azure offers no "Upload" option like say, PHPMyAdmin does where you can hit "browse" and upload a video directly into the field. Can anyone guide me as to how to actually upload a file into a Windows Azure SQL Database so it can be read as a varbinary type? Can it be done within the Azure management portal? Or does it require some sort of external program/service?
To answer your question, the functionality to upload files directly into SQL Azure Database does not exist. This is something you have to do on your own.
Can anyone guide me as to how to actually upload a file into a Windows
Azure SQL Database so it can be read as a varbinary type?
Do a search for uploading files in SQL Server and you will find plenty of examples on how to do that. Take a look at this link for example: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/225446/Uploading-and-downloading-files-to-from-a-SQL-Serv
Can it be done within the Azure management portal? Or does it require some sort of external program/service?
No. This functionality does not exist in Azure Management Portal. As mentioned above, you would need to write some code to do so.
A little bit off-topic comment:
May I suggest that instead of saving the image files in the database you save them in Blob Storage and store the URL of the blob in your table. There're some advantages I could see in this:
Compared to SQL Database, Azure Blob Storage is much cheaper. If you store video files (or in other words large files) in the database, you will end up with large database and thus end up paying more money.
You will be choking the database when reading this large data from the database which will impact the performance of your application.
Can anybody help me in understanding how to upload large files in SQL azure using block.
I am not able to find any good implementation of Blocks to upload files in SQL azure.
Thanks,
Ashwani
You may want to look at storing large files in Azure BLOB Storage. You will end up running out of size in your SQL Azure database, or put yourself into a more expensive SQL Azure price point, by storing files in your relational database. You can always store the pointer to your BLOB in your relational database.