The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News

Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge

“I would educate myself, and that I would never stop educating myself. It was my responsibility to keep learning.”

Who said that? Albert Einstein? Da Vinci? Stephen Hawking?

None of the above. That statement came from the Demon of the rock band KISS, Gene Simmons.

If a rock & roll legend knows that it’s on each of us to take responsibility to keep learning, surely we can share that knowledge and approach.

I bring this up because I’ve recently heard several people tell me something along the lines of “Well, if my company wants me to learn new technology, they’ll need to tell me what to learn, pay for it, and give me the time to learn it.”

Best of luck with that. Look, I agree, your employer should be there to help you out with education, especially if they expect you to learn a new technology or a new way of doing things. However, if you’re going to sit back, toss your hands in the air and simply wait for that to happen, for a very large percentage of you, you may be in for a long wait.

It’s absolutely on us to ensure that we educate ourselves. If that means working nights and weekends sometimes, so be it. We’re working in the knowledge space. You’re selling the fact that you have knowledge. You may want to take complete responsibility on making darn sure that you get that knowledge, whether your company is going to pay for it or not.

Let us follow in the footsteps of Gene Simmons. No, not do things with your tongue. I mean let’s never stop educating ourselves. It is our responsibility.

Grant Fritchey from SQLServerCentral.com

» Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

All the headlines and interesting SQL Server information that we've collected over the past week, and sometimes even a few repeats if we think they fit. These headlines are gathered throughout the week and are posted in real time at the website. Check there for information throughout the week or enjoy this weekly summary of the SQL Server world.

Webinars

Extending DevOps practices to SQL Server databases with Redgate, Git & Jenkins - Join Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Grant Fritchey, for the next Database DevOps demo webinar. He’ll be plugging Redgate’s tools into Git and Jenkins to show you how Redgate's Database DevOps solution helps you build, test and deploy your database changes alongside your app code....(more)

Virtualization and Containers

What Do You Mean My Windows Container isn’t Running? - The Windows Containers tooling is great! It simplifies the process of containerizing your applications, generating Docker and Compose files and giving you the full Docker CLI (command line interface) with the same API that you would use for Linux containers. That said, you may come across a problem where Visual Studio cannot connect to underlying Windows container. Error messages can manifest themselves in a couple of ways....(more)

T-SQL

Statistics in SQL: Student’s t-test - Many undergraduates have misunderstood the name 'Students' in the t-test to imply that it was designed as a simple test suitable for students. In fact it was William Sealy Gosset, an Englishman publishing under the pseudonym Student, who developed the t-test and t distribution in 1908, as a way of making confident predictions from small sample sizes of normally-distributed variables. As Gosset's employer was Guinness, the brewer, Phil Factor takes a sober view of calculating it in SQL....(more)

Simple SQL: Random Thoughts - How does one get a truly random sample of data of a certain size from a SQL Server database table. Well, there are simple non-portable tricks one can use, such as the NewID() function, but then refining those can be tricky. Take the Rand() function for a start. Can it really provide you with a truly random number? Why doesn't the TABLESAMPLE clause give you a set number of rows? Joe Celko scratches his head a bit, explains some of the issues and invites some suggestions and tricks from readers....(more)

The Lighter Side

IT Aphorisms for Developers - Developers enter their trade fizzing with untamed creative energy. They envision spending their days dashing out intricate algorithms that compile first time, developing creative applications that dazzle colleagues and users alike, before leaving the office each evening, with a swagger in their step, to work their new GitHub ‘side project’, which will one day soon become the startup that makes their name and fortune. The world of work for a professional developer never quite matches this fantasy. ...(more)

Software Development

Short-term vs long-term perspective in software development - In this post, Vladimir Khorikov talks about one of the most damaging attitudes a company or a person can have in the field of software development: short-sighted perspective....(more)

Security news and thoughts

What GDPR means to Office 365 - From May 25, 2018, companies with business operations inside the European Union must follow the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) to safeguard how they process personal data....(more)

WannaCry Hero Pleads Not Guilty to Banking Malware Charges - A British cybersecurity researcher credited with helping curb a recent worldwide ransomware attack pleaded not guilty Monday to federal charges accusing him of creating malicious software to steal banking information three years ago....(more)

Using Antivirus with SQL Server - In a perfect world, your SQL Server would be so secure that you would not need antivirus software, you would have behind layers of firewalls, nobody would ever connect with remote desktop to install anything, and it would always have all of the latest security patches… but that is not the real world....(more)

Randomness in Security Configuration - Brian Kelley shares the method he and his team used when they needed to choose a non-standard port for a new web service they were deploying....(more)

Git vulnerability with submodules - The Git community has disclosed a serious security vulnerability in Git that can lead to arbitrary code execution. This has been assigned CVE 2017-1000117....(more)

R Language

A TSQL Developer Contemplates R - Dave Mason talks about his experience with learning more about R language, data science, and big data....(more)

Reproducibility: A cautionary tale from data journalism - Timo Grossenbacher, data journalist with Swiss Radio and TV in Zurich, had a bit of a surprise when he attempted to recreate the results of one of the R Markdown scripts published by SRF Data to accompany their data journalism story about vested interests of Swiss members of parliament....(more)

SQL Server R Services: Working with ggplot2 Statistical Graphics - It is when you use R in SQL Server with one of the huge range of packages that comes with it that you can begin to appreciate the power of the system. With a package such as ggplot there are many 'knobs one can twiddle' in order to get spectacular and informative visualisations. Rob Sheldon continues his beginners series for R in SQL Server by showing how to refine the output to get it as you need it....(more)

PowerShell

Working with Regular Expressions in PowerShell - Matching strings is a common occurrence when writing PowerShell scripts. No matter how many things in PowerShell are objects with lots of useful properties, there always comes a time when you've got a string that isn't quite right. Whether you need to check to see if a string contains certain characters or you need to pull out some information, a regular expression (regex) is a powerful way to make that happen....(more)

T-SQL to Powershell: Substring - Shane O’Neill contrasts the SUBSTRING function in T-SQL with Powershell’s Substring method....(more)

PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI

You Can Now Put Values On Rows In Power BI - Back in January 2016, Meagan Longoria wrote a blog post explaining a DAX workaround that allows you to put measures on rows in a matrix in a Power BI report. In this post she updates that the workaround is no longer needed, because you can now natively put measures on rows in a matrix in both Power BI Desktop and PowerBI.com....(more)

Build PowerBI Real Time Dashboards through Streaming Set with Python - PowerBI supports streaming dataset through an API that can be used to constantly push data to the service for real-time refresh. This post outlines the steps to accomplish it with Python script....(more)

Microsoft News

Can Windows Server Make Hyper-Converged Infrastructure a Boring Commodity? - When you hear about hyper-converged infrastructure, the conversation usually has to do with a handful of specialized startups or a couple of large hardware vendors that have placed big bets on the concept. But hyper-convergence, at its core, is enabled by software, not hardware design; as such, the market is open to entry by software makers, from tiny startups to the world’s largest producer of software: Microsoft....(more)

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Increased Database Security: Another Reason to Adopt DevOps - Don't bury the lead! Databases are critical. If you bring down a database server you might stop a company in its tracks. It is much easier to recover if an application server crashes than if a database server crashes. This is something which people can easily agree on. And with databases being so critical, securing them is vital to the health of the company....(more)

Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google , AWS)

Always Encrypted with Azure Key Vault - Bradley Schacht explores using SQL Server’s Always Encrypted functionality with Azure Key Vault....(more)

Managing Azure Resources with Cloud Shell - Russell Smith looks at the different ways Azure can be managed from the command line, including Cloud Shell, which is currently in preview....(more)

Community Sites

Stop your database being a bottleneck - The new Redgate Hub is the shortcut to the latest insights into database development. Constantly updated with invaluable content, it’s the one resource you need to solve problems, share ideas, discover new tool features, and expand your database skills....(more)

Career Growth

Interviewing Patterns & Anti-Patterns: Advice from the SQL Server Community - Get ready to learn, be amazed, and laugh out loud as you read these posts, which Kendra Little has indexed by the author’s first name....(more)

SQL Cruise Alaska 2017 Kicks Off - August 12, 2017 marked the first day of Tech Outbound’s SQL Cruise Alaska. After 3 years away, SQL Cruise returned to Seattle under hazy skies from the forest fires burning in Central British Columbia. Here's what the event is all about....(more)

Abstracts Open for GroupBy December - Want to present at the upcoming GroupBy December 1 & 8 online conference? If your bucket list includes speaking at a major industry conference like the PASS Summit, then GroupBy can help you get there. Your Summit resume needs to include sessions at a few events, and GroupBy’s online video archives help you really stand out amongst other applicants....(more)

Should You Consider Agile for Very Large IT Projects? - Many large organisations are compelled to embark on wide-ranging business-transformation IT projects. They are difficult to manage because, in the intervening months before the end of the project, the changing business environment will have forced further changes on the business. Agile holds out the promise of managing these changes more easily. Mohammad Rizvi explains, from experience, some of the the issues you are likely to face, and how you can solve them....(more)

Backup and Recovery

Creating better disaster recovery plans - Five questions for Tanya Reilly: How service interdependencies make recovery harder and why it’s a good idea to deliberately and preemptively manage dependencies....(more)

Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Data Lake

Uploading Files to Azure Data Lake Using a .NET App - Azure Data Lake Store is an extendable store of Cloud data in Azure. You can move data to and from Azure Data Lake Store via Azure data Factory or Azure SQL Database and connect to a variety of data sources. You can script upload files from on-premise or local servers to Azure Data Lake Store using the Azure Data Lake Store .NET SDK. Ambily KK shows how easy it is to get started by setting up a script or App to move data to Azure Data Lake Store....(more)

Administration of SQL Server

Using Time Zones in SQL Server - The usage of time zones in applications becomes inevitable, especially with the globalization of the applications. The programming on database level also requires usage of the time zones. In this post there are some examples that will demonstrate usage of time zones....(more)

Bad parameter sniffing decision flow chart - PASS President Grant Fritchey is asking for input on a new flowchart he's creating. See what his first draft looks like and give your feedback....(more)

Killing the "SQL Server is a memory hog" myth - Thomas LaRock explains that if SQL Server is consuming too much memory, the issue might actually be you rather than the program....(more)

Row Level Security and Indexed Views - Louis Davidson explains how row level security works with indexed views - generally speaking, the answer is fairly obvious....(more)

SQL Server vs Oracle: Convert string to date - Daniel Janik discusses how each platform can create a date from a string. This sounds easy but it’s not as simple as it sounds, well at least not for SQL Server....(more)

Using Merge - I was playing with some data, loading it into staging tables and then moving it to a real table. I typically have done this with T-SQL, writing efficient upsert code that works well. However, I haven’t used Merge in a long time and thought I should practice a bit with the structure....(more)

.NET Related Articles

Announcing .NET Core 2.0 - .NET Core 2.0 is now available as a final release - Microsofts' Rich Lander provides all the details....(more)

Creating a Custom .NET Activity Pipeline for Azure Data Factory - Azure Data Factory provides a radical new cloud-based way of collecting and preparing data in preparation for its storage and analysis. How do you get started with it to explore the possibilities it provides? Feodor Georgiev shows the practicalities of how to go about the task of preparing a pipeline for use, from preparing the Azure environment to downloading a file from a FTP to a blob storage in the Azure environment....(more)