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| | | Are You Patched? It's been a few weeks since the Spectre/Meltdown bugs were announced for most CPUs. Microsoft has been working hard to build patches, and they've provided fixes for Windows and SQL Server. Other manufacturers have released fixes for other platforms, though I wouldn't be surprised if more patches are coming. We put together a page at SQLServerCentral with information and links, and if you haven't checked it out, you should. If you haven't patched systems, patch them ASAP. This is a bad bug, affecting many CPUs, across multiple architectures, and includes potential issues with virtual machines. The guidance and conversations I've heard from various vendors is that many of them aren't completely sure of all the potential risks or attack vectors, but they are worried that customers will leave this vulnerabilities open in the future. Since this affects hardware, it's entirely possible that an exploit could read memory from other applications and processes. Again, if you haven't patched systems, patch them. There are reports of potential issues, so everyone certainly needs to test systems. Perform a P->V (Physical to virtual conversion) and patch a VM. Make sure the server still runs. If you're on VMs, snap a copy and patch it as a test. Older processors might see a performance penalty with the patch, but worse performance is better than having a security hole in your CPU available to operating systems. This is the type of fundamental architectural bug that's is very worrisome. The race to be efficient, to copy what works from others, this leads to less innovation not more. I hope that this is a bit of a lesson that we do need separate architectures and approaches to computing problems, both in hardware and software. I love relational databases, but I'm glad that there are other types of systems being used for data storage. I think Windows works really well, but I like competition and think it's good that we have MacOS, Linux, and more. It's good to have standards and interoperability, but I do think that a heterogeneous environment is good for security, and I hope the world continues to try new architectures as we advance computing ever further. Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.comJoin the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
| | The Voice of the DBA Podcast Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn. The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. |
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| | | | Write, format, analyze, and refactor SQL fast with SQL Prompt Writing SQL is 50% faster with SQL Prompt. Your SQL code can be formatted just the way you like it, you can create and share snippets with your team, and with code analysis you get suggestions to improve your SQL as you type. Download your free trial |
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| | | | | Wayne Sheffield from SQLServerCentral.com Let's explore how SQL Server 2017 automatically adapts between nested loop and hash join operators More » |
| | Microsoft has never documented how the database log works, such as its format, its logging mechanism/algorithm, etc. But SQL Server 2017 has introduced a few improvements in some DMVs that expose more details about the status of data and log changes, and we can use the new information to design a better backup strategy. More » |
| | SQL Prompt implements two static code analysis rules to check code for potential misuse of the SET NOCOUNT command. In this post, Phil Factor explains the issue. More » |
| | David Postlethwaite from SQLServerCentral Blogs I had an interesting issue last week. I had to rename non-domain (Workgroup) SQL Server Virtual Machine in Azure. The server... More » |
| | Kenneth Fisher from SQLServerCentral Blogs TL;DR; SA, or if you are really paranoid then you can create a disabled SQL login with minimal permissions and... More » |
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| | | Today's Question (by Steve Jones): I've got a table with the points scored by every NBA player in their career. I decide I want to find out the ranking of various players. I have this query: WITH cteLeaders AS (SELECT prs.firstname , prs.lastname , totalpts = SUM(CAST(prs.pts AS INT)) FROM dbo.player_regular_season AS prs GROUP BY prs.firstname , prs.lastname ) SELECT TOP 10 cteLeaders.firstname , cteLeaders.lastname , cteLeaders.totalpts, PERCENT_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY cteLeaders.totalpts) FROM cteLeaders ORDER BY cteLeaders.totalpts desc In the results, Kareem Abdul-Jabber shows as the highest point total player. What is his percent rank? |
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right. We keep track of your score to give you bragging rights against your peers.
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| Yesterday's Question of the Day |
| Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones): I've got this class (S4) in R. > setClass( + "NFLTeam", + representation( + name = "character", + City = "character", + conference = "character", + division = "character" + ) + ) I create an instance with this code: denver.broncos = new("NFLTeam", name="Broncos", City="Denver", conference="AFC", division="West") Now I want to get the value of the City property. How do I access this?
Answer: denver.broncos@City Explanation: The correct way of accessing this property, or slot, is with the @ symbol. > denver.broncos@City [1] "Denver" Ref: R Slots - click here » Discuss this question and answer on the forums |
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| | | | Evgeny Garaev from SQLServerCentral.com During a database migration or a side by side database upgrade project we need to migrate the MS SQL Server Agent jobs. This script compare jobs by names and shows unmatched jobs from both boxes. That would help to avoid problems related to the forgotten to migrate MS SQL Agent jobs. In order to use this script you need to: create a linked server to the other server replace {OLD_BOX} with your linked server name execute the script. The account which you use to execute this script must have select permissions on the table msdb.[dbo].[sysjobs] on both servers. More »
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| Database Pros Who Need Your Help |
| | Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums. Metldown and Spectre - Has anyone deployed any of the patches released for SQL 2016 and SQL 2017 to any of their environments. Is anyone... Is learning Python/R an advantage for SQL Server Developers? Need an expert advice. - Hello Guys, Is it time for SQL Server Developers to start learning R/Python to excel in their career? Expert advice needed. Should I add indexes to a log table? - Dear all, I have below table in my Data Warehouse. This table has just the function of storing the executions times of... DBCC CheckDB produced errors - Date and time: 2018-01-23 17:47:18 Dear all, While doing DBCC CheckDB I found this issue below: Command: DBCC CHECKDB () WITH NO_INFOMSGS, ALL_ERRORMSGS,... Need to put large database into norecovery state - Hello, I have two servers in an Availability group. Servers A is primary and Server B is secondary. For some reason, the... Merging Data from two tables. - Hello, I thought this would be easy but I'm kind of stuck. I need to get Job Position titles from... ETL and data model design advice needed - I am often required to provide my organization with performance metrics (it is a health care organization so the metrics... Update Table A when table B columns are updated and vice versa - How do i Update Table A columns when Table B is updated. Also I need to update Table B columns... Efficient way of mirroring tables from one sql instance to another - I would like to know what would be an alternative solution to mirror tables from one sql instance to another... SQL SERVER UPGRADE - Hi to you all, i want to upgrade from sql 2008 to 2014 and that will be my first time.My question... Differential Restore Question - SQL 2014 My colleagues and I have been debating whether a Differential or Transactional backup (.bak, .trn) can be restored without... Stored Procedure Dynamic SQL using sp_executesql Not working - I can successfully run a Stored Procedure (SP) that uses dynamic SQL and Exec sp_executesql in my local environment. But... SQL Server to recognize each individual user - What must I do within SQL Server or the SQL Database itself in order for SQL Server to know what... Ghost Process attacks again - Hi, Every now and then, a process (red arrow) executed by SA in our SQL Server 2012 instance blocks our system.... Debit Close and Aging - Hi, I want to aging. drop table #TempStk CREATE TABLE #TempStk( IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL) &nb With Schemabinding - I use With Schemabinding whenever possible, on the theory that it is safer to have things locked up to prevent... Question Regarding Date logic - Hi, I need to get Year, monthname in three letters, startdate and enddate of the month for last two years... opening a rowset failed - hi i have ssis package , loading data from excel file into sql server table. package is working fine if I execute in SSDT when... A simple example which, after 15 years of relational design work, still breaks my brain - phone numbers - Every so often I find myself needing to build schema for something which has very little complexity in the "real... Encrypt the whole database - Hi Techies, I have requirement to encrypt the whole database ( all data in all tables ) so that if anybody get... |
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