{"id":3233,"date":"2017-12-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/blog\/last-week-in-azure-week-of-2017-11-27"},"modified":"2025-06-27T02:32:24","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T09:32:24","slug":"last-week-in-azure-week-of-2017-11-27","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/last-week-in-azure-week-of-2017-11-27\/","title":{"rendered":"Last week in Azure: Location-based services, Azure Migrate, and more"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In addition to several stories and announcements last week related to data and analytics in Azure, we announced two significant public previews. First, at AutoMobility LA<\/a>, we announced the public preview of Azure Location Based Services<\/a>, which is a new Azure offering to power the \u201cLocation of Things.\u201d  This includes geographical data that can better connect smart cities, infrastructure and IoT solutions, and empower industrial transformation, from manufacturing to retail to automotive \u2013 and everything in between. Second, now you can quickly and cost-effectively migrate your on-premises applications, workloads, and databases to the cloud with the Azure migration center<\/a>, which launched in preview last week. It provides guidance, insights, and mechanisms to assist you in migrating to Azure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Headlines<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Announcing Azure Location Based Services public preview<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Azure Location Based Services (LBS) adds native location capabilities to the Azure public cloud. LBS is a portfolio of geospatial service APIs natively integrated into Azure that enable you to create location aware apps and IoT, mobility, logistics and asset tracking solutions. The portfolio, provided in partnership with TomTom, includes Map Rendering, Routing, Search, Time Zones and Traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Launching preview of Azure Migrate<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Azure Migrate, which is now in preview, enables agentless agent-based discovery of VMware-virtualized Windows and Linux virtual machines. This enables dependency visualization, for a single VM or a group of VMs, to easily identify multi-tier applications. It also suggests workload-specific migration services, such as Azure Site Recovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data + Analytics<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Technical reference implementation for enterprise BI and reporting<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Use this technical reference implementation to accelerate the deployment of a BI and reporting solution to augment your data science and analytics platform on Azure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Server aliases for Azure Analysis Services<\/strong><\/a> – Server aliases for Azure Analysis Services enables you to connect to an alias server name instead of the server name exposed in the Azure portal, which makes it easier to migrate models, create friendly names, and have greater flexibility for managing traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Run your PySpark Interactive Query and batch job in Visual Studio Code<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Thanks to the integration of HDInsight PySpark into Visual Studio Code, you can now edit Python scripts and submit PySpark statements to HDInsight clusters and submit PySpark statements to HDInsight clusters in an interactive query-response experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automatic tuning introduces Automatic plan correction and T-SQL management<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Automatic tuning in Azure SQL Database now includes automatic plan correction, management via T-SQL, and a new column (auto_created) in the system view to identify indexes created by automatic tuning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elastic database tools for Java<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 An update to the Elastic Database Client Library for Azure SQL database supporting Java that provides tools to help you scale out the data tier of your applications using sharding, including support for multi-tenancy patterns for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Azure Analysis Services integration with Azure Diagnostic Logs<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 New support for Azure Monitor Resource Diagnostic Logs enables you to run diagnostic logging on production Azure Analysis Services servers without a performance penalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ADL Tools for Visual Studio Code (VSCode) supports Python & R Programming<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Support is now available in Visual Studio Code for Azure Data Lake (ADL) Python and R extensions to work with U-SQL for data extract, data processing, and data output.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Management<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Introducing Azure Automation watcher tasks public preview<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Using Azure Automation you can now integrate and automate processes across Azure and on-premises environments using a hybrid worker. Automatically response to events in your datacenter using watcher tasks, which give you the ability to poll systems in your environment with a watcher runbook and then process any events found by calling an action runbook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Get notified when Azure service incidents impact your resources<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 The Azure Service Health preview enables you to create and manage alerts for service incidents, planned maintenance, and health advisories. You can also integrate your existing incident management system like ServiceNow\u00ae, PagerDuty, or OpsGenie with Service Health alerts via a webhook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Service Updates<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Azure is changing and growing daily. Azure Updates provides a feed of service updates that don\u2019t always come with an announcement blog post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n