Cumulative Update #23 for SQL Server 2019 RTM

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The 23rd cumulative update release for SQL Server 2019 RTM is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site. Please note that registration is no longer required to download Cumulative updates.
To learn more about the release or servicing model, please visit:



Starting with SQL Server 2017, we adopted a new modern servicing model. Please refer to our blog for more details on Modern Servicing Model for SQL Server


How Azure is keeping customers secure against the Rapid Reset DDoS Vulnerability

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Bad actors can expose a new security vulnerability to initiate a DDoS attack on a customer’s infrastructure. This attack is leveraged against servers implementing the HTTP/2 protocol. Windows, .NET Kestrel, and HTTP .Sys (IIS) web servers are also impacted by the attack. Azure Guest Patching Service keeps customers secure by ensuring the latest security and critical updates are applied using Safe Deployment Practices on their VM and VM Scale Sets.  


 


As the latest security fixes are released from Windows and other Linux distributions, Azure will apply them for customers opted into to either Auto OS Image Upgrades or Auto Guest Patching. By opting into the auto update mechanisms through Azure, customers can remain proactive against security issues rather than reacting to attackers. Customers not leveraging the auto update capabilities through Azure Guest Patching Service are recommended to update their fleet with the latest security updates (KB5031364 for Windows and fix for CVE-2023-44487 related to Open-Source Software distributions).  


 


Without the latest security updates, organizations risk exposing their systems and data to potential security threats and web attacks. It is important for organizations to plan for this update to avoid any disruption to their business operations.  


 


Microsoft recommends enabling Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) on Azure Front Door or Azure Application Gateway to further improve security posture. WAF rate limiting rules are effective in providing additional protection against these attacks. See additional recommendations from Microsoft Security Response Center for this vulnerability.  


 
Enabling Auto Update Features: Azure recommends the following features to ensure VM and VM Scale Sets are secured with the latest security and critical updates in a safe manner: 


 


Auto OS Image Upgrades: Azure replaces the OS disk with the latest OS Image. Supports rollback and rolls the upgrade across scale sets throughout all the regions. 


Auto Guest Patching: Azure applies the latest security and critical updates to an asset and rolls the update across the fleet throughout all the regions.  


 


The recent announcement of a new security issue is an important reminder for organizations to stay current with their software solutions to avoid any security or performance issues. Azure continues to keep customers secure by rolling out the latest security updates through multiple mechanisms for VM and VM Scale Sets in a safe manner. Customers are recommended to leverage the auto update capabilities in Azure to ensure they remain proactive against bad actors.  

Introducing multiple recurrence support for the work hour calendar in Universal Resource Scheduling (URS)

Introducing multiple recurrence support for the work hour calendar in Universal Resource Scheduling (URS)

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The work hour calendar multiple recurrence feature is a new URS functionality that allows you to create and manage work hour calendars with more flexibility and efficiency. You can now define multiple recurrence patterns for your work hour calendar events, such as daily, weekly or monthly, and specify different start and end dates for each pattern. This way, you can easily accommodate different work schedules, holidays, and special events in your organization.

The new multiple recurrence feature in the upcoming V2 work hour calendar can help you to:

  • Add multiple recurrences within a single day, to represent different instances of recurring shift work e.g. morning, afternoon and evening shifts in a single day with different recurrences
  • Have overlapping recurrences within a week e.g. A recurrence for Mon and Wed, and a recurrence for Tues. Previously the Tuesday recurrence would have deleted the Mon and Wed entries; now they can coexist alongside each other.
  • Input work hour events in different timezones, which is helpful for workers who travel. Previously, the calendar supports only one timezone across all work hour calendar events.

What are work hour calendar events and why are they needed?

Work hour events define when a resource is available to perform work, and they exist as 2 types:

  • Occurrences (one-time events) are work hour events that happen only once on a specific date and time. Occurrences always take priority over Recurrences. E.g. team cohesion days, seminars or emergencies.
  • Recurrences (repeating events) are work hour events that repeat on a regular basis according to a pattern and frequency. E.g. rotational shift work, weekly cadences, monthly client visits

Occurrences and recurrences can be used today in URS to define different types of work hours, such as working hours, non-working hours, breaks and time off.

How did URS handle work hour events before (V1 work hour calendar)?

Before this update, only 1 recurrence event is supported per calendar day, for a given date span.

Scenario 1, Jane is a doctor who does shift work at various clinics:

  • Recurrence 1 (morning shifts): 7am-12pm UTC, repeats Mon, Tues, Wed
  • Recurrence 2 (afternoon shifts): 1pm-5pm UTC, repeats Tues, Wed, Thu
  • Recurrence 3 (night shifts): 7pm-11pm UTC, repeats Wed, Thu and Fri

The old work hour calendar does not support more than 1 work hour event per calendar day, so this scenario would not be supported

Scenario 2, John is a utilities engineer with different work hours on alternating days:

  • Recurrence 1: 8am-5pm UTC, repeats Mon, Wed and Fri
  • Recurrence 2: 6am-8pm UTC, repeats Tues and Thu

Adding both recurrences was not supported in the old work hour calendar; Recurrence 2 would have deleted the Mon, Wed and Fri entries from Recurrence 1 for a given date span.

Scenario 3, Becca is a travelling salesperson who works in both Seattle and Singapore:

  • Recurrence 1 (work in Seattle): 8am-5pm PT, repeats all days of the week
  • Recurrence 2 (work in Singapore): 8am-5pm SGT, repeats all days of the week

Adding both recurrences of different timezones was not supported in the old work hour calendar.

How does URS handle work hour events now (V2 work hour calendar)?

The new V2 work hours calendar now follows the following logic:

  • Occurrences have a higher priority than Recurrence rules for a given calendar day. So if there were two rules (one occurrence and one recurrence) on the same day, the daily occurrence or time-off occurrence will take the priority over the weekly recurrence for the entire calendar day.(Unchanged from previous)
  • When there are multiple recurrences within the same date span:
    • If the times do not intersect, they will both remain on the calendar
    • If the times conflict, the rule that was most recently created/modified will be the one that is considered for the resource’s calendar. All other conflicting rules in the date span will be removed. In the event that some recurrences have conflicts on some dates but not on others, the rule will be spliced to retain the non-conflicting events, while removing the events on dates that do have conflicts.

Scenario 1, Jane is a doctor who does shift work at various clinics:

  • Recurrence 1 (morning shifts): 7am-12pm UTC, repeats Mon, Tues, Wed
  • Recurrence 2 (afternoon shifts): 1pm-5pm UTC, repeats Tues, Wed, Thu
  • Recurrence 3 (night shifts): 7pm-11pm UTC, repeats Wed, Thu and Fri

Create Recurrence 1, Recurrence 2, then Recurrence 3 in succession. All will now show up on the calendar as seen below

Scenario 2, John is a utilities engineer with different work hours on alternating days:

  • Recurrence 1: 8am-5pm UTC, repeats Mon, Wed and Fri
  • Recurrence 2: 6am-8pm UTC, repeats Tues and Thu

Create Recurrence 1, then create Recurrence 2 in succession. Both will now show up on the calendar as seen below:

Scenario 3, Becca is a travelling salesperson who works in both Seattle and Singapore:

  • Recurrence 1 (work in Seattle): 8am-5pm PT, repeats all days of the week
  • Recurrence 2 (work in Singapore): 8am-5pm SGT, repeats all days of the week

As seen above both Seattle and Singapore work hours are both easily expressed on the V2 work hours calendar. Note that the Singapore work hours are shifted to match the dispatcher’s Timezone i.e. Pacific Time – the timezone of the calendar itself is visible at the bottom left of the calendar, and the dispatcher can be altered this in <Personalization Settings>.

What else has changed/remains unchanged?

Previously in the V1 Work Hour Calendar, only 1 recurrence is allowed per calendar day, thus adding any new recurrences will completely override the work hour events for that calendar day.

With the V2 Work Hour Calendar, the previous work hour events will only be overridden if there is a direct conflict in time between the 2 recurrences.

For instance, Joel is an equipment technician with the following work hours:

  • Recurrence 1 (regular work hours): 9am-5pm PT, repeats all days of the week
  • Recurrence 2 (temporary work hours): 1-9pm PT, only from Jul 10-14

Create Recurrence 1, then create Recurrence 2 in succession. As seen below, Recurrence 2 overrides Recurrence 1 for the Jul 10-14 period because there is a direct conflict between the recurrences. All other work hour events remain.

The following dialogue will now appear whenever a new work hour event is added, in order to remind users of this behavior:

Occurrences remain unchanged from the previous V1 calendar i.e. Occurrences always take priority over Recurrences and will override recurrences for the entire day.

For instance, Duke is an equipment technician with the following work hours:

  • Recurrence 1 (regular work hours): 9am-5pm PT, repeats all days of the week
  • Occurrence 1 (team cohesion): 6-9pm PT, only on Aug 1

Create Recurrence 1, then create Occurrence 1 in succession. As seen below, Occurrence 1 completely overrides all other work hours events for the Aug 1 calendar day even if there is no direct collision between the Recurrence and the Occurrence.

When will the V2 Work Hour Calendar be available, and how can I get my hands on it?

The V2 Work Hour Calendar will be available early-September 2023 in our Early Adoption Wave 2 update. You can opt in through Power Platform Admin Center, as seen below:

How can I find out more?

If you want to learn more about the new work hour calendar multiple recurrence feature, you can:

Read the documentation here: Edit work hour calendars by using APIs in Dynamics 365 Field Service – Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft Learn

Join the community forum here: https://community.dynamics.com/

Contact the support team here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus/

We hope you enjoy the new work hour calendar multiple recurrence feature and find it useful for your business needs. We appreciate your feedback and suggestions on how to improve our products and services. Thank you for choosing Dynamics 365!

The post Introducing multiple recurrence support for the work hour calendar in Universal Resource Scheduling (URS) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Microsoft Syntex adds taxonomy and image tagging, OCR, content query, annotations, and more

Microsoft Syntex adds taxonomy and image tagging, OCR, content query, annotations, and more

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Welcome to the fall! This month’s Microsoft Syntex update is gearing up to be a great one in the world of content processing. We have updates on Syntex taxonomy tagging and image tagging; a set of Syntex capabilities coming to preview for pay-as-you-go users; the general availability of the Syntex optical character recognition (OCR) is expanding to include PDF and TIFF support; and lastly, both Syntex OCR and Syntex structured document processing are moving to general availability.


 


Syntex taxonomy tagging and Syntex image tagging in general availability



In our previous blog post, we shared that Syntex taxonomy tagging and image tagging were rolling into general availability. We’re happy to share that both services have now completed rollout and are generally available to all Syntex pay-as-you-go users.


 


As a refresher, Syntex Taxonomy Tagging uses AI to help you label and organize documents by automatically tagging them with descriptive keywords, based on your taxonomy defined in SharePoint. By applying a taxonomy column and enabling taxonomy tagging, the document is automatically tagged with keywords from your term store to help with searching, sorting, filtering and more. This reduces manual work, and makes it faster and more efficient to categorize, find, and manage files in your document libraries. Overview of taxonomy tagging in Microsoft Syntex – Microsoft Syntex | Microsoft Learn


 


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Taxonomy Tagging – the location column auto-populates based on your term store in this example


 


Syntex Image Tagging is now also generally available. Image Tagging is an AI-powered service that helps you label and organize images by automatically tagging them with descriptive keywords. These tags are stored as metadata to optimize searching, sorting, filtering, and managing your images. With this Syntex service, it’s much faster to categorize and search for specific images that you need. Overview of enhanced image tagging in Microsoft Syntex – Microsoft Syntex | Microsoft Learn


 


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Image Tagging – images are auto-tagged with descriptive keywords



New features in preview for Syntex pay-as-you-go users



We’re excited to share that, for a limited time, Syntex pay-as-you-go users now get to use all the Syntex features previously only available to customers with the SharePoint Syntex seat license. If you’re not yet a Syntex customer, now is a particularly great time to give it a go. These services will be available as a preview through June 30, 2024.



1. Content query – an advanced, powerful search with custom metadata in a form-based interface
2. Universal annotation – add ink and highlights to additional file types like PDF & TIFF supported by our file viewer
3. Accelerators – preconfigured templates that leverage Syntex capabilities in an end-to-end solution for common scenarios like contract management and accounts payable
4. Taxonomy services – admin reporting on term set usage, easy import from SKOS-formatted taxonomies, and the ability to push a content type to a hub
5. Content processing rules – lightweight automation for common operations such as moving or copying a file, and setting a content type from the file name or path in SharePoint
6. PDF merge/extract – combine two or more PDF files into a new PDF file, or extract pages from one PDF into a new one


 


MicrosoftTeams-image (93).png


Site accelerator – preconfigured site templates for Accounts Payable


 


For Syntex pay-as-you-go customers, these capabilities will be readily available to you without taking any action or set up and without any additional charge. Microsoft Syntex features limited time license – Microsoft Syntex | Microsoft Learn



Syntex OCR and structured document processing will be generally available this month



Lastly, Syntex optical character recognition (OCR), which was previously in public preview, will be generally available this month! In images containing text – such as screenshots, scanned documents, or photographs – Syntex OCR automatically extracts the printed or handwritten text and makes it discoverable, searchable, and indexable.


 


It can be used for image-only files, now including PDF and TIFF as mentioned in the introduction, in OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange, Windows devices and Teams messages. Searching for images is improved thanks to OCR, and IT admins can better secure images across OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange, Teams and Windows devices with data loss prevention (DLP) policies.


 


MicrosoftTeams-image (94).png


Optical Character Recognition (OCR) auto-extracts text from images


 


You will also be able to use both the Syntex structured and freeform document processing features later this month when they become generally available as a new pay-as-you-go meter called “Structured document processing”. Unlike in the past, you will be able to use these services with your Azure subscription – no per-user license required, no AI Builder credits needed (but if you want to use AI Builder credits, we will still support that as well). Microsoft 365 roadmap ID 167309. Get started here.



Stay connected



And there you have it, lots of updates on Syntex services that will help your organization manage your content and improve content discovery, with less redundancy and greater efficiency. To get the latest on Syntex, join our mailing list for updates, and register for the upcoming October 18th Syntex Community Call.


 


Be sure to also connect with us at Microsoft Ignite, November 14-17, 2023, in Seattle or virtually!

Realize Lakehouse using best of breed of Open source using HDInsight

Realize Lakehouse using best of breed of Open source using HDInsight

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Author: Reems Thomas Kottackal, Product Manager


 


HDInsight on AKS is a modern, reliable, secure, and fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) that runs on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). HDInsight on AKS allows an enterprise to deploy popular open-source analytics workloads like Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Trino without the overhead of managing and monitoring containers.


 


You can build end-to-end, petabyte-scale Big Data applications spanning event storage using HDInsight Kafka, streaming through Apache Flink, data engineering and machine learning using Apache Spark, and Trino‘s powerful query engine. In combination with Azure analytics services like Azure data factory, Azure event hubs, Power BI, Azure Data Lake Storage.



HDInsight on AKS can connect seamlessly with HDInsight. You can reap the benefits of using needed cluster types in a hybrid model. Interoperate with cluster types of HDInsight using the same storage and meta store across both the offerings.

The following diagram depicts an example of end-end analytics landscape realized through HDInsight workloads.


 


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We are super excited to get you started, lets get to how?