Tag Archives: Azure

Power Automate, Flow, Is Great Until It Isn’t

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve done a fair bit of ‘Flowing’, that is using/implementing Microsoft Power Automate Flows for a couple clients. One is particular is quite heavily invested using it to process online form, push data to SQL Azure, process e-mails, send e-mails, … It has been quite a journey and I’ve posted a few articles in the past about some of it:

My First Venture Into Using Flow

For months, if not years, MS and certain fellow MVPs have been promoting the virtues of Microsoft Flow. Until recently, I simply never had a reason to even look at it as I had no need for any of its supposed capabilities. That said, working on a new project for one of my clients and a new request by my client made me look into one particular aspect of Flow, the MySQL Connector. My Goal In the scenario we are talking about in this posting, I had a pretty simple MySQL database in which we wanted to create a table…

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A figure holding a magnifying glass examining a Flow icon

To Flow, or Not To Flow, That is the Question!

I’ve been using Power Automate Flows for heading on 2 years now on an extensive project for one of my client’s and I thought I’d give people some more insight into my experience using them. You can consult my original post on the subject: I’ve used a number of connectors, such as: HTTP Request is received Send email When a new email arrives Execute Store Procedure Insert row and more … and, in the process, interacted with numerous systems: Exchange Azure/SQL Server MySQL SharePoint and more …

and several more!

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Add An IP Address To An Azure SQL Database Firewall

Azure, Azure SQL Databases are quite secure and try to limit access to minimize security risks. This, is a great thing. That said, as developers, we often need to remotely access such tools to be able to perform our work.

So how can we do so?

The solution, in the case of Azure SQL Databases, is to create an exception for your IP address in the Firewall rules. Once you authorize your IP address, assuming you have proper login credentials, you will be able to go about your business and connect remotely to that Azure resource.

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Flow – I.rootGraph.getNode(…) is Undefined

The more I work with Power Automate, and Flow in particular, the more I love and hate it at the same time.

When it works, it is exceptional!

The issue is that it doesn’t always work. I’d even go as far to say, that from my perspective they are unreliable.

I have nightly flows that typically run for 2-3 minutes (running for months and month now) and every once and a while, suddenly, out of the blue, they take 35-45 minutes and timeout never successfully running. Now nothing ever changes at my end, so it is a Microsoft/environment thing.

I have a Flow to log in-going and out-going e-mails into a central database. I’ve seen multiple instances where, for some unknown reason, a few sporadic e-mails don’t get logged?! All you get is a ‘Bad Gateway’ error with no actionable information. We also recently experienced a period of a couple minutes where every e-mail was not logged, so a guess a service failure.

Today, trying to update a Flow, I ran into a new issue. I searched online and found not a single post on the subject, so I thought I’d share my knowledge on the subject (which isn’t much). I was actively editing a Flow, trying to move an action and paste from my Clipboard and received the following error.

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Wanna Try Azure SQL Database For Free!!!

I recently came across an announcement from Microsoft and thought I’d share it here.

It would seem that Microsoft has finally made it possible for anyone to try out Azure SQL Database and even perform development for free!

You can read all the details at:

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Microsoft Support At Its Best

I recently chronicled my first attempt at using Access’ DataVerse export ‘feature’:

Access - My First Venture Into Dataverse

I had a new client for whom I thought Dataverse might be a perfect solution to their need. So I set out to give it a whirl and see if Dataverse could do the job, see if the hype and demo I had been shown by Microsoft lived up to their ‘promise’. The proverbial ‘kick…

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Access – My First Venture Into Dataverse Part 2

So I’ve been playing around with Dataverse a little more today in a continuation of yesterday’s fiasco! So if you haven’t already seen my previous post, best start by reviewing: Below are my preliminary observations and my impressions may change with time and experience, but as of today, this was my impression of things.

After many, many hours of work I got enough functional that I wanted to provide a demo to a client. The question then became, HOW? Since it is linked to my Account, how can I share it out to an external user.

How can I share a set of tables, not all the tables, with an external user?

I played around in the DataVerse Table admin pages and found nothing remotely about security and/or permissions.

Then I decided to ask the Access Dev Team directly, as surely they would know, this had to have been planned for! Sadly, I was informed they didn’t know and it was more an Azure question.

I spent 2 days, looking here and there, trying all sorts of things, turning in circles through the labyrinth that is the admin centers in Microsoft’s WWW (Microsoft, Office, PowerApps, Azure, …), posting in forums, to ultimately never manage to successfully do so. So I then decided to try using Microsoft support.

After submitting the ticket, an hour or so later I received the following confirmation

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Power Automate – Delay Action

Just a quick word of caution with an issue I recently encountered while trying to develop a Power Automate – Flow.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but I was building a branch of a Flow and needed to add in a pause/delay and so I added a Delay Action. Everything worked fine.

Then my client decided that they no longer wanted a delay, so I set the delay Count (the interval) to 0 and saved my worked.

A little while longer, I received failure notices stating:

The provided ‘Wait’ action interval count ‘0’ is not valid. This must be a positive integer.Microsoft Power Automate

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Azure Web Services Don’t Do It!

<rant>
So what did I learn this week?

In short, don’t use Microsoft Azure Web Service to host your applications!

That’s right, don’t do it.

I had a client with a PHP application that was running on another host. He wanted to put everything under the Microsoft Umbrella and so we migrated the app. We’ve been very happy overall with the service for about 2 years and saw a nice boost in performance too (but that is more because the switched away from using shared hosting though).

So why am I advising you stay away from it then?

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Access – Connecting to an Azure SQL Database

More and more we want/need to be able to use an Access database and not be restricted to the confines of a local office LAN. One potential solution can be to migrate the back-end (the tables) to Microsoft Azure and relink the front-end to the Azure SQL database, thus creating what is known as an Access hybrid database.

The beauty here is the back-end database is hosted in the cloud (in this case in the Microsoft cloud) and accessible to anyone that can run Access and whom has an Internet connection. The drawback here is performance, although query tuning can greatly improve this aspect as well as using Azure SQL database views, and pass-through queries in Access.

The Overall Process

There are 2 key steps to this process:

Creating an initial File DSN
Linking the tables in Access

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Azure SQL – Automate Database Maintenance

Recently, I have been knee deep in doing a MySQL migration to Azure SQL. I quickly learnt that Azure SQL required a lot more attention than its MySQL counterpart. So an Index and Statistic maintenance plan was needed, and urgently to keep things humming along smoothly.

Much to my amazement, Azure SQL did not offer the typical SQL Server Agent! Everything in Azure is extra!!!

So I started doing a little digging and found a couple options. One potential solution which I was exploring was to create an Automation Account to run a Maintenance Stored Procedure on a daily/weekly basis. I only mention this as it may be an avenue worth exploring for some.

In my case, because the client I was helping already was using flow and was already using the premium SQL Server connector, I decided to go the Power Automate Flow route to automate the maintenance. Thus providing a solution at no extra cost to them.

The Overall Idea

My process is very straightforward:

Create an Azure SQL Stored Procedure that performs the necessary index and statistic optimization
Use Power Automates Flow to run it on the desired schedule

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