How to know the life history of your data in Azure SQL databases, Purview workflows are now in preview and how to protect your APIs from those pesky hackers. There's certainly a lot going on in the Azure world. Hi, I'm Erik Gross, welcoming you to another episode of Azure This Week. Trying to figure out the history of data in applications can be really difficult. After all, your data may have had a rough life - pulled in by a parameterized stored procedure that uses dynamic SQL, transformed for consistent units of scale, aggregated with data from other sources, you get the idea.

Tracking all this by hand is awful. Well, there is hope on the horizon. In Azure Purview's new "dynamic lineage extraction" service. If you use Azure SQL database, you can now add dynamic lineage metadata to your data maps. This lets you trace data acquisition, transformation and aggregation and get you to your root cause faster.

Imagine having insight into when a stored procedure was run, and by whom, as well as what application on which server kicked off the stored proc. This can help you govern privacy, comply with regulations, and just better understand your overall data and processes. So start extracting lineage today. Wait, that doesn't sound quite right, but don't let that stop you from checking it out. Keen to start your cloud journey? We've just launched a new limited time offer for our personal plus annual plan, giving you a savings of 33%.

The personal plus plan gives you access to great course features like Hands-on labs and practice exams, making it easier to kick-start your cloud career. If you’re interested, scan the QR code on the screen, or click the link in the description. So here's a real tongue twister. Purview workflows are in preview. You probably got the idea from our first story that Azure Purview is all about tools for data governance.

As long as computers work with our data, we're usually fine. But when you let humans have a hand in things, well, can you say Skynet? Seriously though, if you don't control how users create, update and delete your data, you can get quite a mess as far data quality. One solution: create custom data workflows that enforce policy compliance, let you track changes, and keep your data quality high. To consider just one use case, let's say a user tries to delete an important doc that's bound to one of these workflows. You can set that workflow up to generate approval requests, send notifications, and even check loss prevention rules.

And that's one example of what you can do with the public preview of Purview workflows. Just don't try to say it fast. Whether your API uses SOAP or REST, those endpoints are gonna be a tempting target for bad actors. While there are a lot of things you can do to protect your backend services, making sure your HTTP requests and responses are safe is pretty high on the list. You now have one more tool to help you do this, as endpoint validation of your API requests and responses just went into general availability.

How does it work? You'll specify your acceptable schema for requests and responses. And the Azure API management platform will enforce them. It's that simple. And it works for both SOAP APIs and REST APIs. You can put your schema definitions in WSDL files, in OpenAPI files, or in some other schema file that you create.

It's super versatile. You even get to decide whether to simply log the offending request or to block it entirely. Keeping your API safe just got a lot easier. Are you going to start doing genealogy on your data? Try locking down your APIs? Let me know in the comments what you think, and give us a thumbs up. Also, join our Azure This Week discord channel to discuss the news from this episode, interact with other students and ACG people, and get help for your cloud journey.

You’ll find a link below in the description. That's all our news for this week. See you next week and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.