Is Change Feed available for Tables in Cosmos DB - database

I've read the documentation for change feed, and downloaded the Table API, but cannot find any feed support for tables...
Am I missing something or is change feed only available for documents and the document API ?

The current version of change feed is exposed through the DocumentDB API. The Cosmos DB team is currently investigating how to best enable change feed to users across all the APIs. Please help us prioritize this work on the Cosmos DB feedback forums here: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/263030-azure-cosmos-db

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It is possible to create an API call to SQL database?

Well, probably this is a stupid question, but after to surfing the web the last week...this is my last shot.
Questions:
It is possible to create an API to call a SQL database to retrieve records?..In a secure way..?
What apps/tools/methods can I use? hopefully...VS, Python, PowerShell...etc
Can I encrypt that call?and create a method to decipher the data?
I'm not the app owner, what questions should I make to the app developer?
FYI Currently I cannot use cloud vendors or third party tools to do the transformation :(. But if there is a strong tool/vendor maybe I can negotiate it.
I have consulted:
API to database: API to Database?
How to quickly create a simple REST API for SQL Server database - https://medium.com/voobans-tech-stories/how-to-quickly-create-a-simple-rest-api-for-sql-server-database-7ddb595f751a
Any ideas?
Try rolling out redash with the bitnami stack. It's free, as in speech.
Bitnami will take care of setting up https etc if you do it on AWS. You need a t2-small I think. There's how-tos for let's encrypt etc also.
You can dish out links to "widgets" with an embedded API key. The widgets can be json or csv. They will only provide access to predefined data queries, but you can get that data from anywhere, not just your SQL server.

Salesforce integration - categorisation based on pricing plans

I am stuck as a developer trying to explore Salesforce for integrating with my CRM which is used by our clients as SaaS.
Background of what i want to achieve in the integration
The idea is that my CRM software allows many features that Salesforce does not and vice-versa. Due to this a typical client who is using my CRM (Saas) ends up using both the softwares. This ends into duplication of efforts where for eg: a customer created in my CRM has to be copied over to Salesforce manually from Salesforce UI.
The integration that i wish to provide will work like a 2 way integration where a customer created from my CRM gets created as Accounts in Salesforce and vice-versa. Same way sync of edits and deletes across the 2 system should work.
Problem that i am having
When i started exploring Salesforce integration, i found that Salesforce allows integration to be done in below ways
Apex trigger based system - I was able to achieve 2 way syncing with Salesforce and my CRM using Apex approach. But the problem is it requires me to access their web api's to send data from my CRM to Salesforce. This feature is only supported in higher pricing plans of Salesforce (Enterprise, Unlimited, Professional - you have to pay extra if you are using professional)
App based approach (eg: Slack): I am looking more towards this approach. As Slack integration works for almost all pricing plans and is supported well. What i could not conclude clearly is - how can i create an App for my CRM and get it listed on Salesforce? How does Salesforce allow an App based access from Slack to submit data into Salesforce system for lower pricing plans. Their documentation says that Api access is only available for higher pricing plans. Then how is this achieved? For eg: you can install Salesforce app into Slack and there after you can send messages to chatter service under individual accounts of Salesforce from Slack.
I am really not sure if i have given enough insight into the problem i am having. But i tried explaining as much as possible. In short i want to integrate 2 way with Salesforce and i am looking for possible solution that is supported at lower pricing plans as well. What type of integration should i go forward with?
Look into using an ETL provider that already is a salesforce technology partner (Boomi, Jitterbit, etc...).
These are already on appexchange.com, and as certified appexchange apps, can access data in salesforce Professional Edition (which does not allow open API access).

exporting data for analytics use in SaaS

We are a SaaS product and we would like to be able have per-user data exports that will be used with various analytical (BI) tools like Tableau or PowerBI. Instead of just managing all those exports manually, we thought of using some cloud database such as AWS Redshift (which will be part of our service). But then, it is not clear how is user will access those databases naturally, unless we do some kind of SSO integration with AWS.
So - what is the best practice for exporting data for analytics use in SaaS products?
In this case you can build your security in to your backend API layer.
First you can set up processes to load your data to Redshift, then make sure that only your backend API server/cluster has access to redshift (e.g. through a vpc with no external ip access to redshift)
Now you have your data, you can validate your user as usual through your backend service, then when a user requests a download through the backend API, the backend can create a query to extract from redshift only the correct data based upon the users security role. In order to make this possible you may need to build some kind of security column into your redshift data model.
I am assuming getting data to redshift is not a problem.
What you are looking for, if I understand correctly is a OEM solutions.
The problem is how does one mimic the security model you have in place for your SaaS offering.
That depends on how complex is your security model.
If it is as simple as just authenticate the user and he has access to all tenant data or the data can be easily filtered for user. Things are simple for you. Trusted authentication will allow you to authenticate that user and user filtering will allow you to show him all that he has access to.
But here is the kicker, if your security is really complex , then it can become really difficult to mimic it within these products.
Here for integrating tableau this link will help:-
https://tableau.github.io/embedding-playbook/#
Power BI, this product am not a fan off. I tried to embed a view in one my applications and data refresh was a big issue.
Its almost like they want you to be a azure shop for real time reporting.( I like GCP more )
If you create the api's and populate datasets then they have crazy restrictions like 1MB/sec etc.
On the other instances datasets can be refreshed only 8 times.
I gave up on them.
Very recently I got a call from Sisense and they seemed promising as well from a OEM perspective. You might was to try them.

I want to be able to store and retrieve my research articles. Any suggestions?

I am beginning to design an application that will allow me to upload and retrieve my research articles. I need the ability to attach information to each article such as APA citation, annotated bibliography and meta tags for search. Can this be accomplished with front-end development or only with a back-end database?

Web Analytics & Stats

We want to add tracking statistics to a web application we are building but are pretty unsure of how to go about it. (i.e. clicks, pageviews, unique visits etc)
Does anyone have any articles on the best way to go about incorporating tracking data into an application ? i.e. javascript tracking or IIS etc ?
We want to add tracking in as a ASP.NET MVC module - but we are unsure as to the best way to actually get the data and essentially 'track' this information ?
If anyone could help out - much appreciated.
Edit: just to be clear, we want to do this in-house and present the stats to our users as an additional fee module?
You can turn on the logging for IIS and then use the SQL Server Report Server Pack for IIS. It comes with many canned reports for your sites stats and then you could take it from there with your own custom reports.
You could also just use log parser to get the stats into a SQL Server DB and then you could use SQL from their to analyse and roll your own app.
Either way, you could modularize this and sell it as an add-on to your customer base.
You could use Piwik, you just need PHP version 5.1.3 or greater and MySQL version 4.1 or greater. As they say in their website, "Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics."
They have a demo on the official website so you can see if it's what you're looking for.
Google analytics is a popular service. You just insert a bit of javascript on every page that contains your sites name and Google tracks the data and provides all the report on a handy web based dashboard.
It's not an ASP.net MVC module like what you mentioned, but it will certain track stats for you and will be a lot simpler to set up than trying to code or integrate anything yourselves.
I'd look at analytics to begin with and only branch out to something more complex if it doesn't meet your requirements.
klabranche provided a holistic answer in terms of using logs of web server. I think using web server log is a a great way to analyse data of your web application.
That being said, depend on your web application and the scope of your analytics, just relay on web server log is not a good way to.
As you may know, web log does not record users behaviors like clicking certain tabs which may not trigger a web server request. Obviously your web log has no idea whether users clicked that tab or not, this may hurt your analyse.
Another you need to know is browser cache, this may create another black hole in your data.
RECAP
If you want to do a holistic analytics, you need to use two approaches, one is JavaScrip tag, another one is web log. Since both of them have shortages, combining them together will give you a complete picture.
Hope this helps

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