Here I would like to list down the different ways to connect from Azure to On-Premise SQL Server.

VPN

We can create a site-to-site VPN for connecting from Azure to On-Premise.  Here the VPN device on Azure takes care of transmitting the request to the On-Premise network.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/connect-an-on-premises-network-to-a-microsoft-azure-virtual-network

Azure Data Factory

Azure Data Factory requires running an Integration Runtime service in the On-Premise machine to make the connectivity happen.  It also requires Outbound port opening from On-Premise machine if there is any Outbound connection required back to the Azure SQL.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/data-factory/

Azure Hybrid Connections

Hybrid Connections are created within the App Service.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/app-service-hybrid-connections

https://nishantrana.me/2018/02/19/using-azure-hybrid-connections-to-connect-to-sql-on-prem-database-from-azure-webjob/

Azure Service Bus Relays

Relays create endpoints on the On-Premise application which can be accessed by the Outside World.

Link: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/overview-of-azure-service-bus-relay/

Express Route

Express Route is a highly secured option as it creates a new connectivity other than Public Internet.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/expressroute/expressroute-introduction

On-Premises Data Gateway

If you…

Recently, we were working on Power Automate where we were supposed to set a variable for further use based on the value of an option set field in an entity.

We used Switch action and inside Case block we were trying to set the variable as shown below:

While executing the Power Automate, unfortunately, we were getting error: Action ‘Set_Claim_Type_REPW’ failed.

Surprisingly, there was no additional details to the error message for which we spent significant amount of time finding the root cause. We tried to tweak the sequence of Set Variable action and it was working fine. So, we made sure that at least there is nothing wrong with the Set Variable action.

Finding no other way to address this issue, we changed the Switch action to multiple Condition actions which we avoided initially as it’d look messy but ended up accepting that as the workaround.

So, finally our…

In my previous posts, I mentioned about how we can leverage Customer Insights build unique customer profiles, create measures / KPI and display the demographics in Dynamics 365 Apps using customer card add-in.

To continue this series of posts on Customer Insights, let’s talk about what we can do with Segments.

This post is about using those unique profiles & KPI to build segments and extend these segments to execute marketing campaigns / customer journeys using Dynamics 365 Marketing.  We’ll target to achieve the following: