The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News

Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge

I find it extremely easy to sometimes lose sight of the important stuff. The day-to-day grind can seriously get in the way. I think this is a big part of how we find ourselves having so many silly intra-organizational turf wars. The developers don’t like how the DBAs do things. The DBAs are frustrated with the SAN Admins. Round and round it goes. I think we all tend to lose sight of the ability to see things from another point of view.

This is a picture of the Teutonic Knights. They’re kind of a special Prussian off-shoot of the Knightly Orders from the Crusades, think Templars or Hospitalars. I had just been reading about them in this excellent book on the Holy Roman Empire.

They look great don’t they? Mighty and powerful. Riding with them in the Northern Crusade (yeah, there were Crusades in places other than the Middle East) must have made you feel pretty amazing. After all, you’re campaigning to bring those heathen Slavs into the fold.

That’s one perspective.

The other perspective is that you’re a Slav who is pretty happy with his current religion, thank you very much, and over the hill comes this mob of armed and armored monsters slaughtering all & sundry.

Every so often in your career, DBA, Dev, Analyst, doesn’t matter. I think it wouldn’t hurt to assess how you are doing things, why you’re doing them, and the impact that’s having on those around you. The single worst statement that can be made by an IT professional is “We’ve always done it that way.” That’s not a justification for continuing to do something the same way. IT is constantly changing. We’re going to have to change with it. This means stopping the resistance to the change. However, it also means looking at how we’re implementing the change.

I’d prefer to neither be the Teutonic Knights or their victims. Instead, I’d prefer it if we found a way to work together since we have a common goal, maintaining our business.

Grant Fritchey from SQLServerCentral.com

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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.

Virtualization and Containers

A virtualized CPU forced me to eat my lunch early, every day, for weeks - Ed Elliott worked one particular contract where he was forced to take lunch at 11:35 every day, and it was all the fault of virtualization!...(more)

Vendors/3rd Party Products

SQL Server Database Provisioning: Getting Started with SQL Clone - This article serves as a ‘first look’ at cloning databases with SQL Clone. It will review some of the database provisioning challenges that we seek to overcome, explain briefly how SQL Clone works, and then walk through a simple example of cloning a database....(more)

SQL Source Control v6 now supports SQL Server 2017, SQL Graph, and TFS 2018 - SQL Server 2017 went on general release a couple of weeks ago and the latest version of SQL Source Control offers full support, as well as support for Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2018. This brings a whole host of benefits and opens up cross-platform workflows, encompassing both on-premises and cloud, through connections to SQL Server instances on Linux and Azure Active Directory authentication....(more)

The Lighter Side

The real origins of the Agile Manifesto - Many people think the Agile Manifesto was born in in February 2001, when 17 people met at the Snowbird ski resort in Utah. But there’s a problem, a big problem - in fact, one about the size of the USA’s first ever jet fighter. In this blog post, Matt Hilbert looks back to 20th century aircraft design, and finds some very familiar ideas....(more)

SQL Server on Linux

Enabling the SQL Server Agent in Linux Containers - At SQL Saturday Holland a few weeks ago I was (surprise, surprise) chatting about containers and mentioned that I hadn’t been able to get the SQL Agent working. Now, one of the benefits of attending SQL Saturdays is that you get to pick the brains of a lot of very clever people and luckily for me, Jan Van Humbeek was there....(more)

Security news and thoughts

New wave of data-encrypting malware hits Russia and Ukraine - A new, potentially virulent wave of data-encrypting malware is sweeping through Eastern Europe and has left a wake of outages at news agencies, train stations, and airports, according to multiple security companies....(more)

Can your client or employer read your HTTPS traffic? - So you’re working for a client or employer who doesn’t let you bring your own device for security reasons. This is quite common and makes a lot of sense in several ways. But could they really read your HTTPS browser traffic?...(more)

R Language

Loading R Packages: library() or require()? - When I was an R newbie, I was taught to load packages by using the command library(package). In my Linear Models class, the instructor likes to use require(package). This made me wonder, are the commands interchangeable? What’s the difference, and which command should I use?...(more)

R Misteaks - Episode I - Buck Woody covers some of the basic mistakes that you might run into if you're new to R....(more)

PowerShell

Defending Against PowerShell Attacks - The security industry is ablaze with news about how PowerShell is being used by both commodity malware and attackers alike. Surely there’s got to be a way to defend yourself against these attacks!...(more)

Microsoft News : General Interest

Microsoft Woos IT Administrators With Windows 10 Fall Creators Update - Mixed-reality may be Windows 10 Fall Creators Update's headline feature, but security-conscious IT administrators may be drawn to other features....(more)

Microsoft News : Patches, Bugs

SQL Server 2017 CU1 is Available - On October 24, 2017, Microsoft released SQL Server 2017 Cumulative Update 1, which is Build 14.0.3006.16. ...(more)

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

How advanced is database DevOps in financial services? - Whether you’re exploring the advantages of DevOps or already fully immersed in the journey, including the database brings additional advantages. But how are you performing compared to the competition? What could you do better? What’s the benchmark you should be aiming for?...(more)

Data Visualisation

Data Visualization Basics for Data Scientists - Making up one of our primary senses, sight is immeasurably important to conveying information, and it’s vital to the Data Scientist to understand how to best use various visualizations to display and discuss data....(more)

Data Science

A manifesto for Agile data science - In this article, Russell Jurney talks about applying methods from Agile software development to data science projects....(more)

Databas(ics) - The beginning of data science is data. In this article, Buck Woody starts with the absolute basics, but quickly gets deep....(more)

Conferences and Events

Create your own database with all PASS Summit 2017 Sessions using SQL Server 2017 ML Services (Python) - Next week is the biggest event for the SQL Server community: PASS Summit 2017! In this post, Arvind Shyamsundar shows how to import all the PASS Summit 2017 session titles, abstracts and other details into a SQL Server table....(more)

Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google , AWS)

Why It's a Mistake to Rely on Cloud Providers for All Data Protection - Veritas research reveals that 69 percent of organizations wrongfully believe that data protection, data privacy and compliance are the sole responsibility of the cloud service provider....(more)

Azure SQL Database

Query Store – SQL Server 2017 vs Azure SQL Database - Obviously it's the same tool across local and cloud databases, but there is one subtle difference between the two - let’s play spot the difference....(more)

Top Questions from New Users of Azure SQL Database - This blog attempts to answer the basic questions, while also providing additional background and references for more information. The goal is to help new and existing users of the service to implement their data tier on Azure SQL Database quickly and efficiently, while avoiding common mistakes....(more)

AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services

Key considerations for building an AI platform - The right AI solution is the one that fits the skill set of the users and solves the highest-priority problems for the business....(more)

The Five Minute* Guide to Machine Learning - This post looks at what Machine Learning is all about, gives a couple of important terms to understand, and explains what you can use it for. ...(more)

How companies can navigate the age of machine learning - To become a “machine learning company,” you need tools and processes to overcome challenges in data, engineering, and models....(more)

Administration of SQL Server

SQL Server Phantom Reads - With Halloween around the corner what better topic to discuss than phantom reads. A phantom read occurs when rows have been inserted after a read operation and becomes visible in a follow-up read operation within the same transaction....(more)

Use ostress to load test a SQL database - Have you ever wondered how you could take one or more .sql files you captured as a workload and run them against a SQL Server or Azure SQL Database to test performance or impact? Microsoft has a free tool to do just that – ostress....(more)

Enabling Encrypted Connections with SQL Server Configuration - This post is centered on describing our investigation of these three questions regarding encrypted connection setup and usage by SQL Server Configuration Manager (SSCM)....(more)

Drop That Schema - An often under utilized or maybe even mis-utilized feature of SQL Server is a database object schema. In the event of the latter, there is an occasional requirement for change. When this need arises, it can turn into a bit of a problem. That is of course if we are not well prepared. In this article, Jason Brimhall explores one possible change – the dropping of a schema....(more)

Importing JSON Data from Web Services and Applications into SQL Server - To support many applications, it makes sense for the database to work with JSON data, because it is the built-in way for a JavaScript or TypeScript application to represent object data. It can mean less network traffic, looser coupling, and less need for the application developer to require full access to the base tables of the database. However, it means that the database must do plenty of checks first before importing. Phil Factor explains how it can be easily done....(more)

Find Untrusted Foreign Keys and Orphaned Key data - SQL Server tracks untrusted Foreign keys in sys.Foreign keys with a column called is_not_trusted. There are a number of reasons why a Foreign key may have become untrusted, but what do you do with them once they are?...(more)

5 Extended Events Sessions Your SQL Server Instance Cannot Live Without - SQL Server Extend Events is a general event-handling system. It correlates data from SQL Server and, to a limited degree, the operating system. Extended Events are an optimized replacement for SQL Trace. In most cases, Extended Events are much lighter weight and they are always the preferred method for trace events. In addition, there are thousands more Extended Events than SQL Trace events. The list of Extended Events is growing with every major version of SQL Server....(more)

Cleaning up Troublesome SQL Server Caches Using Up Memory - Tracy Boggiano has written an automated process to clear the cache when it reaches a certain size....(more)

In-Memory OLTP diagnostic script - Ned Otter shares a script he's been working on that evaluates a SQL Server environment for anything related to In-Memory OLTP. Though in his own words it's a work in progress, so use at your own risk!...(more)

Extended Events Profiler (XE Profiler) in SSMS - Starting in SSMS version 17.3, we have an interesting new feature: Extended Events Profiler (XE Profiler). This new feature is in a very early stage, but it seems to be a first step to replace SQL Profiler, which is already deprecated....(more)

Implementing Temporal Tables Where You Have Existing Data - Temporal tables aren’t just about monitoring change, they also provide really nice methods for being able to query historical data – to see what the values were at a particular point in time....(more)

Synchronous VS Asynchronous Statistics Updates - Changing from Update Statistics Synchronous to Auto Update Statistics Asynchronously is a simple change that can have a big impact when implemented in highly transnational OLTP environments....(more)

Schema only backup or schema only DB copy - Every now and again you have a database where you don’t necessarily need the data. It can easily be re-loaded or re-created. Or maybe you need a copy of the database, but since you don’t need the data, a backup of the 750gb database seems a bit excessive. What do you do?...(more)

When is it a good idea to consolidate multiple instances? - In this age of cost-saving after cost-saving, one way you may be looking at saving money is by combining multiple instances into one in order to save on licensing/machine costs. Or possibly you have a new database and want to decide if it can reside on an existing instance or if you need a whole new installation. Here are a few things you should keep in mind....(more)