If you’ve ever hardcoded values in Terraform, I have some bad news… and some great news! The bad news? Hardcoding is a one-way ticket to frustration and messy code. The great news? Terraform variables and outputs can save your sanity by making your infrastructure code dynamic, reusable, and scalable.
If you’ve ever tried assembling IKEA furniture without looking at the instructions (we’ve all been there), you know how chaotic it can get. Terraform is no different—if you don’t follow the right workflow, you’ll end up with a cloud mess instead of a well-structured infrastructure.
Thankfully, Terraform has a straightforward workflow that helps you move from defining your infrastructure to deploying it seamlessly. In this post, we’ll break down the key steps of the Terraform workflow and how to use them like a pro!
Managing infrastructure can feel like herding cats—if you don’t keep track of what’s going on, chaos ensues. That’s where Terraform state comes in. It’s like the master ledger for your cloud empire, tracking every resource Terraform manages so you don’t lose your mind.
Learning a new tool is like learning a new language—you’ve got to understand the grammar before you can start forming sentences. Terraform’s native tongue is HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language), and trust me, it’s way easier than high school French (no weird verb conjugations here). In this post, we’ll break down the basics of HCL so you can write Terraform configurations that are clean, dynamic, and downright fun.
So, you’ve heard about Terraform, but you’re wondering:
“What the heck is Terraform, and why should I use it?”
What if you could go back in time and see exactly what your database looked like yesterday, last week, or even last year? Sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, right?
Well, Temporal Tables in SQL Server let you do exactly that!
Ever wished you could store semi-structured data in your database without dealing with complex table relationships? Good news! SQL Server has native JSON support, and EF Core makes working with JSON columns easier than ever.
Whether you’re handling dynamic configurations, logging data, or flexible user preferences, JSON columns let you mix structured and unstructured data in SQL Server—without creating dozens of extra tables.
Not everything in your database needs a primary key. Sometimes, you just want to query views, stored procedures, or raw SQL results without forcing a unique identifier on them. That’s where Keyless Entity Types in EF Core come in!
If you’ve ever struggled with querying database views, reports, or read-only datasets, this feature is exactly what you need. Let’s dive into what Keyless Entity Types are, when to use them, and how to make them work in EF Core.
Grouping data in Entity Framework Core (EF Core) used to feel a little… clunky. Sometimes, LINQ’s GroupBy() worked beautifully in-memory but got lost in translation when executing SQL queries. You’d write a simple GroupBy(), and EF Core would pull all the data into memory before doing the grouping—not good!
But things are getting smarter and more efficient in recent versions of EF Core! With LINQ GroupBy enhancements, EF Core now translates more grouping operations into optimized SQL queries, saving memory and improving performance.
We’ve all been there—you’re halfway through a multi-step transaction, and boom! 💥 Something fails. You don’t want to roll back everything, just the part that went wrong.
That’s where Transactional Savepoints come in!
Savepoints let you partially roll back transactions, keeping the good stuff while undoing just the problematic parts. If you’ve ever wished for a “Ctrl + Z” in database operations, this is it.