The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News

Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge

I noticed this week that Australia passed a law that requires companies to hand over user information, even if encrypted. Quite a few articles that point out this might require backdoors to be created in communication systems to comply with the law. Companies are required to provide plain text user communication if they can, or build tools to allow this if they do not have the capability. The proponents of the bill argue this is necessary for criminal prosecution.

Perhaps they are right, but if this capability is required, this means that either companies will have backdoors built into their products that allow them to decrypt things you might have expected to remain encrypted. That's disconcerting to me, not because Apple, Google, or someone else might read my communications, but because no company has really proven they can protect all the data they store.

Can you imagine how many malicious actors might spent their efforts trying to find those backdoor encryption keys? What if there aren't backdoor keys, but companies decide to build some sort of key logger into software that copies data before it's encrypted. Can you imagine how problematic it might be to secure that data?

I'm also concerned because this would mean that there could be a few keys that can be used to get access to encrypted data, something like "master keys" in door locks. In this case, the loss of a key might mean problems for huge numbers of people. The other option would be lots of backdoor keys, potentially a different one for each customer/device, in which case we have a large data set that I'm sure will get leaked. At that time, how likely will it be that we'll be able to implement new keys for large numbers of people?

I sympathize with law enforcement. In some ways, their jobs are much harder. In others, however, I think they have many more tools, and the need to weaken encryption doesn't seem to be necessary. Many of us have a need to secure data, to protect it from unauthorized access. At a time when security is proving to be a challenge and record numbers of data breeches are occurring, do we really want tech companies to start building products with less security? I don't.

Steve Jones 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

SQL in the City Streamed December 2018 - The theme for December 2018's SQL in the City Streamed is Your Journey to Compliant Database DevOps. The schedule includes sessions designed to broaden your skillset, support your ongoing learning, and keep you up-to-date with what’s new in the industry and at Redgate....(more)

Year in review with Kendra, Steve, Grant and Kathi: The best of 2018 and our predictions for 2019 - Join Microsoft Data Platform MVPs Kendra Little, Steve Jones, Kathi Kellenberger and Grant Fritchey live to discuss the highlights they’ve seen in 2018 and what cool things they hope to be surprised with in 2019. Along the way they'll share their own personal moments of glory, and favorite goofy memories as well....(more)

Virtualization and Containers

SSIS, Docker, and Windows Containers, Part 0 – Getting Started - To begin tinkering with SSIS in containers, you first need to install Docker. There are some prerequisites. I will not exhaust the prerequisites here. I strongly suggest you familiarize yourself with the requirements for Docker prior to attempting to ......(more)

Creating a SQL Server 2019 Demo Environment in a Docker Container - I have learned something new! I now know how to run SQL Server 2019 in Docker and how to set up my demo environment in a container. Cool stuff! I like whales. Whales are cool. In this post, I share my approach and code snippets for: - Installing Docker - ......(more)

Vendors/3rd Party Products

New Case Study: Ensuring HIPAA compliance with SQL Provision - New case study from Redgate. Since adopting SQL Provision, KEPRO, a leading US healthcare organization, have been able to achieve HIPAA compliance, save 15-20 hours a week in provisioning processes, and reclaim terabytes of disk space. ...(more)

Review your SQL Server permissions with SQL Census (in preview) - SQL Census allows users to gain a clear picture of SQL Server access, from SQL roles and permissions to Active Directory account and group memberships. The tool provides a simplified view of these permissions, along with the path by which they were gained. There's more to come and you can help shape the future of the tool by joining the preview now....(more)

The 4 pillars of SQL Server Monitoring - 5 SQL Server experts; Grant Fritchey, Rodney Landrum, Kathi Kellenberger, Phil Factor and Tony Davis, use their many years of experience working and maintaining data systems to explain the 4 key strategies required for a successful, estate-wide monitoring solution. ...(more)

T-SQL

Producing Data and Schemas in JSON array-of-array format. - JSON was initially designed for the informal transfer of data that has no schema. It has no concept of a table, or of an array of identical arrays. This means that it must tell you each key for each object, even if the original data object was a table. ...(more)

I Have an Exclusive Lock, My Row Is Safe, Right? - Note: This is an update of a blog I posted in 2006 with a lot of additional information (I was less wordy in my 30s apparently). It is just as relevant today. I have a presentation I do occasionally on concurrency entitled “Let Me Finish” that covers ......(more)

Overview of DML Operations – SQL Delete - This article on the SQL Delete is a part of the SQL essential series on key statements, functions and operations in SQL Server. To remove a row from a table is accomplished through a Data Manipulation Language, aka DML statement, using … Continue reading ......(more)

SQL Date functions in SQL Server - SQL date format functions like the DateDiff SQL function and DateAdd SQL Function are oft used by DBAs but many of us never took the time to fully understand these extremely useful features. For professionals just getting started with SQL … Continue ......(more)

Advent of Code 2018 – Day 4 (Repose Record) - Advent of Code 2018 – Day 4 As I explained in a recent post, I’m participating in this year’s Advent of Code challenge, with the twist of doing the challenges in T-SQL. In case you don’t know what “Advent of Code” is, Eric Wastl (t) created it for the ......(more)

Advent of Code 2018 – Day 5 (Alchemical Reduction) - Advent of Code 2018 – Day 5 As I explained in a recent post, I’m participating in this year’s Advent of Code challenge, with the twist of doing the challenges in T-SQL. In case you don’t know what “Advent of Code” is, Eric Wastl (t) created it for the ......(more)

Basic Sequences–#SQLNewBlogger - Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. I haven’t used sequences much in my work, but I ran into a question recently on how they work, so I decided to play with them ......(more)

Turbo Charged Staging\Caching Tables With In Memory OLTP - Since SQL 2012 some really awesome new technologies have been introduced into the engine that are massively underused. Everyone is familiar with the traditional row store tables that SQL Server uses and people either don’t know about or are scared off ......(more)

SHUTDOWN SQL Server - Recently a friend by the name of Chris Bell (blog | twitter) wrote about an easy way to disrupt SQL Server. That disruption comes in the form of the SHUTDOWN TSQL command. You can read what Chris wrote from his article here. Granted, you do need to ......(more)

Database Fundamentals #20: Using the JOIN Operator, Inner Join - It is entirely possible to try to JOIN two tables on almost any field, as long as the two data types can, in some way, be made to reconcile to each other, you can try to join the tables. But, most database designs assume a much more directly relationship ......(more)

Plansplaining, part 9. Recursive CTEs - I had to skip three months, but finally it is here: part eight of the plansplaining series. Each of these posts takes an execution plan with an interesting pattern, and details exactly how that plan works. I am pretty sure that (almost) everyone reading ......(more)

Prepared T-SQL Statements - I recently started reading Grant Fritchey's book SQL Server Execution Plans. I didn't get too many pages deep before the topic of query parameterization and prepared statements came up. As Grant notes, prepared statements "are built from the application ......(more)

The Lighter Side

Neither bird nor plane: Captain Marvel blasts into space in new trailer - Enlarge / Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) in all her iconic glory. (credit: Marvel Studios) Captain Marvel took off into space Monday night, delivering knock-down punches and lots of adrenaline-fueled action in the character’s first starring film this ......(more)

Tech News

Why AWS Is Getting into the Satellite Data Business - As more satellites are hurled into space, ground-station access becomes the biggest satellite-data bottleneck. ...(more)

SQL Server Security

Managing Logins and Users Across An Availability Group - What’s the deal with logins and availability groups? I’m sure that we all, when creating a login that accesses a database that happens to be part of an availability group, diligently go and create that login on all secondary replicas, don’t we?! Of course, ......(more)

SQL Server on Linux

How to Linux for SQL Server DBAs — Part 3 - The series so far: How to Linux for SQL Server DBAs — Part 1 How to Linux for SQL Server DBAs — Part 2 How to Linux for SQL Server DBAs — Part 3 As you jump into Part 3, you’ll begin to realize how involved your education will be with Linux, and how ......(more)

Software Development

UDL files and connection strings - A co-worker showed me a really neat trick the other day. We deal with a lot of connection problems and one of the first places I look is the connection string. Now I’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years and more often than not I can point to problems. ...(more)

What Is SQL Injection? - Say we have a stored procedure that queries the Stack Overflow database. We have two separate parameters, @DisplayName and @Location, so folks can search for people by name, location, or both. For performance reasons, we decide to build dynamic SQL:CREATE ......(more)

Security news and thoughts

Your Personal Data is Already Stolen - In an excellent blog post, Brian Krebs makes clear something I have been saying for a while: Likewise for individuals, it pays to accept two unfortunate and harsh realities: Reality #1: Bad guys already have access to personal data points that you may ......(more)

Quora Discloses Data Breach, Doubts It Will Result in Identity Theft - DAILY VIDEO: Quora discloses a data breach impacting 100 million users, and NeuVector improves container security with admission control. ...(more)

Australia passes new law to thwart strong encryption - Enlarge / The Member for Sydney Tanya Plibersek speaks as the Labor party stay for the end of parliament in the House of Representatives at Parliament House on December 06, 2018, in Canberra, Australia. (credit: Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images) On Thursday, ......(more)

Quantum Computing Will Put Your Data at Risk - “Too many secrets.” – Martin Bishop One of the pivotal moments in the movie Sneakers is when Martin Bishop realizes that they have a device that can break any encryption methodology in the world. Now 26 years old, the movie was ahead of its time. You ......(more)

Marriott CFO Calls $1 Billion Estimate on Cyber Breach Premature - The company could face $200 million in fines and litigation expenses, and could spend about $1 per customer notifying victims and providing free data monitoring services, according to a note last week from Morgan Stanley. ...(more)

Marriott breach leaves 500 million exposed with passport, card numbers stolen - Enlarge / Marriott Hotel brands like the W hotel were breached between 2014 and 2018. (credit: Craig Warga/Bloomberg via Getty Images) On Friday, Marriott International announced a system breach that has affected approximately 500 million customers, ......(more)

R Language

Automated Dashboard with various correlation visualizations in R - CategoriesProgrammingTagsCorrelationData VisualisationIn this article, you learn how to make Automated Dashboard with various correlation visualizations in R. First you need to install the `rmarkdown` package into your R library. Assuming that you installed ......(more)

NYC buses: C5.0 classification with R; more than 20 minute delay? - CategoriesAdvanced ModelingTagsData ManagementData VisualisationR ProgrammingWe are continuing on with our NYC bus breakdown problem. When we left off, we had constructed a rule-based Cubist regression model with our expanded pool of predictors; but ......(more)

Python in SQL Server

Getting Started with Data Analysis in Python After Using SQL - SQL is the dominant language for data analysis. While you can do advanced statistics in pure SQL, it's often a lot simpler to use Python. This post is about starting that transition. ...(more)

Product Upgrades and Releases

Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical tier is Generally Available - We are happy to announce General availability of Business Critical tier in Azure SQL Managed Instance – architectural model built for high-performance and IO demanding databases. After 5 months of public preview period Azure SQL Managed Instance Business ......(more)

The November release of Azure Data Studio is now available - We are excited to announce the November release of Azure Data Studio (formerly known as SQL Operations Studio) is now available. Download Azure Data Studioand review the Release Notes to get started. Note: If you are currently using the preview version, ......(more)

SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 3 is now available - The SQL Server team is excited to bring you the third service pack release for SQL Server 2014. This service pack is now available for download from the Microsoft Download Center as well as the Microsoft Update Catalog, Microsoft Developer Network, Microsoft ......(more)

SSMS 17.9.1 is now generally available - We are excited to announce the release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 17.9.1. Download SSMS 17.9.1 today and for details please see the Release Notes. This is a minor update to 17.9 with the following important improvements: Occasionally, SSMS ......(more)

Announcing Entity Framework Core 2.2 - Today we're making the final version of EF Core 2.2 available, alongside ASP.NET Core 2.2 and .NET Core 2.2. This is the latest release of our open-source and cross-platform object-database mapping technology. EF Core 2.2 RTM includes more than a hundred ......(more)

Announcing .NET Core 2.2 - We’re excited to announce the release of .NET Core 2.2. It includes diagnostic improvements to the runtime, support for ARM32 for Windows and Azure Active Directory for SQL Client. The biggest improvements in this release are in ASP.NET Core. ASP.NET ......(more)

Announcing ML.NET 0.8 – Machine Learning for .NET - ML.NET is an open-source and cross-platform framework (Windows, Linux, macOS) which makes machine learning accessible for .NET developers. ML.NET allows you to create and use machine learning models targeting scenarios to achieve common tasks such as ......(more)

Microsoft open sources key Windows UX Frameworks, launches first Visual Studio 2019 preview - Microsoft is open sourcing WPF, Windows Forms and Win UI via GitHub and making available the first public preview of Visual Studio 2019. ...(more)

Product Reviews and Articles

Database Continuous Integration with the Redgate SQL Toolbelt and Azure DevOps - Database CI in theory and practice What you need to get started Step 1: Create a new Azure DevOps project and clone the repository Step 2: Linking a database to source control Step 2.1 (optional): Writing a build script using SCA and PowerShell Step ......(more)

Build and fill a database using JSON and SQL Change Automation - When you are developing a database, and doing regular builds from Source Control, you must produce a working database, of course, but it also needs data. The data you use will vary according to the type of tests you need to run. Integration test runs ......(more)

PowerShell

Getting Details from a Maintenance Plan using PowerShell - You must know your enemy before you can replace your enemy... ...(more)

Getting SQL Services, Starting, Stopping and Restarting them with dbatools - There was a question in the #dbatools slack channel Getting dbatools dbatools enables you to administer SQL Server with PowerShell. To get it simply open PowerShell runInstall-Module dbatoolsYou can find more details on the web-site Finding the Command To ......(more)

PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI

Listing Windows Language Code Identifiers And Their Associated Date And Number Formats With M In Power BI/Power Query - In a comment on my blog post about international date and number formats and changing data types with the “using locale” option in Power Query/Power BI, Jan Karel Pieterse asked if there was any way to get a list of the thousand and decimal separators ......(more)

Power BI Aggregations Step 3: Configure Aggregation Functions and Test Aggregations in Action - Aggregation can speed up the performance of DirectQuery sourced tables significantly. To use it, firstly you need to create an aggregation table, secondly, you need to set up proper storage modes for tables in the model. Finally, you have to configure ......(more)

Power BI Desktop: How to find the native query after query folding - Have you wondered how to find the native query in Power BI Desktop after query folding does its thing? Do you even know what query folding is? In this video, Adam looks at how you can find the query that will be sent to your data source and a few things ......(more)

Rename Blank in a Slicer in Power BI - A common problem I see some people struggle with in Power BI is when a slicer contains a (Blank) record for some reason. The cause of the problem is not obvious and hence it is not clear how to fix it. This article describes what causes this to occur ......(more)

DAX, Power Platform, Aggs, Power BI Dataflows and more… (December 3, 2018) - Fun with DAX – A-Maze-ing DAX (@PhilSeamark) 24 Days of PowerPlatform – Day 1 – Let’s kick it off.. (@wstrasser) Power BI Fast and Furious with Aggregations (@Rad_Reza) Power BI Dataflows and Slow Data Sources (@SQLAllFather) Determine columns you don’t ......(more)

How Permissions Work for a Power BI Service Administrator - A Power BI administrator is a role for managing various aspects of the Power BI Service. This role can be assigned in Office 365. Anyone with Office 365 global admin privileges is also a Power BI administrator by default. Based on the tests I've been ......(more)

Performance Tuning SQL Server

Indexed View Matching With GROUP BY And DISTINCT - Bit Of A Kick I’ve been playing with indexed views a little bit lately for some demos in my Bits Precon. There are a whole bunch of limitations in creating indexed views. One of them is that you can’t base the query on DISTINCT. Fair enough, but you ......(more)

“Surely this one will get a clustered index scan.” - I love building demos for our training classes because I’m constantly in a battle of the minds with SQL Server. I try to guess what he’s going to do next, and I love it when he surprises me. I started by building a new parameter sniffing demo with the ......(more)

Indexing In Memory OLTP Tables - Indexing on In Memory OLTP tables is a little different from your traditional on-disk rowstore tables… In Memory Differences… There is no clustered index The nonclustered index still exists but its structure is quite different. There is a new hash index ......(more)

Microsoft News

Microsoft's Edge to morph into a Chromium-based, cross-platform browser - Microsoft is going to remake its Edge desktop browser by using Chromium components and by bringing it to Windows 7, 8.1 and macOS, in addition to Windows 10. ...(more)

MDX/DAX

Understanding numeric data type conversions in DAX - This article describes how DAX automatically converts data types in arithmetic operations. These small details can cause and explain differences in results when using the same operations in other languages. A DAX expression usually does not require a ......(more)

DAX : Inventory or Stock Valuation using FIFO - All source files for this article can be downloaded here : A good friend and member of my local Power BI User Group contacted me recently to ask if I might help with a problem he trying to solve in DAX. He was keen to track the value of items purchased ......(more)

Hardware News

Surface Book 2 Owners Encounter BSOD After Windows 10 Cumulative Update - Surface Book 2 owners have complained about getting the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) after installing the KB4467682 update for the Windows 10 April 2018 Update. ...(more)

Innodisk Launches Ultra-Slim M.2 Graphics Card - Innodisk has launched a graphics card in the M.2 form factor. It's based on the Silicon Motion SM768 controller and supports 1920x1080 resolution at 60Hz and 3840×2160 at 30Hz. ...(more)

Seagate Starts to Test 16 TB HAMR Hard Drives - Seagate on Monday disclosed that it had begun testing the industry’s first HAMR hard drive intended for evetualy commercial release. With a capacity of 16 TB, the HDD is being used primarily for internal tests to prepare for its high-volume launch and ......(more)

The Seagate BarraCuda (500GB) SSD Review: Getting Back In The Game - Seagate has been one of the top names in the storage industry for decades, but it's almost exclusively for their hard drives. The company has been largely absent from the consumer SSD market, and their enterprise SSDs have never particularly stood out ......(more)

Toshiba Launches 12 TB and 14 TB HDDs for Desktops and NAS - Toshiba on Thursday said that its latest and largest hard drives for high-end desktops and NASes will be available later this month in the US. The new N300 and X300-series HDDs will offer not only increased capacities, but also provide improved performance. Available ......(more)

Panasonic Announces Its First Thunderbolt 3 SSDs - Panasonic has unveiled its first external SSDs featuring a Thunderbolt 3 interface. Panasonic’s Thunderbolt 3 Compact Lightweight Portable SSD enables the company to offer high-performance storage devices for its TB3-enabled PCs. However, it looks like ......(more)

HA/DR/Always On/Clustering

10 Points that Often Get Forgotten During Disaster Recovery Planning - Based on client "scar tissue," here are 10 disaster recovery planning lessons learned from experience. ...(more)

Graph Databases

SQL Graph, part III – Derived Tables & Views - This is the 3rd blog post in the growing series of blogpost on the Graph features within SQL Server and Azure SQL Database that started at SQL Graph, part I, and hopefully will carry on for the many years to come with the development of the Graph engine ......(more)

ETL/SSIS/Azure Data Factory

Azure Data Factory v2 and its available components in Data Flows - Many of you (including me) wonder about it. Namely: Is it possible to move my ETL process from SSIS to ADF? How can I reflect current SSIS Data Flow business logic in Azure Data Factory? And turned out that new feature in ADF: Data Flow – comes with ......(more)

Custom configuring an Azure SSIS integration runtime - I've been doing some Power BI work recently where my customers had on-premises databases that were fairly large. After building a data model in Power BI Desktop that accessed the data directly, we published it up to PowerBI.Com, installed and configured ......(more)

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Learning resources for DevOps. - Guest post by Microsoft Developer Advocate Aaron (Ari) Bornstein, this content is perfect if your looking at developing a course or learning material for students on getting to grips with DevOps. Follow him on twitter at https://twitter.com/pythiccoder ......(more)

Database DevOps without compromising the data - Database DevOps has arrived and is here to stay. However this has also brought friction with the increasing importance of data privacy and protection. Redgate’s Compliant Database DevOps whitepaper outlines how you can introduce DevOps processes and their benefits while also keeping your information and data safe....(more)

Database Design, Theory and Development

What Is a Data Model, and What It Is Not - “The term data model is used in two distinct but closely related senses. Sometimes it refers to an abstract formalization of the objects and relationships found in a particular application domain, for example the customers, products, and orders found ......(more)

Data Science

Why Data Science is Not Statistics - Click to learn more about author Alex Paretski. Statistics as a branch of applied mathematics plays an important role in identifying hidden patterns in data. That’s why it is frequently used interchangeably with broader terms such as Data Science, Data ......(more)

Data Privacy, Complianace, and GDPR

SQL Data Discovery and Classification in SSMS 17.5 - Data exploration and documentation can be cumbersome, classifying data can be one of those tedious but necessary things. With the introduction of such things as GDPR there is an ever greater need to classify and label your sensitive data. Microsoft attempts ......(more)

Where do data breaches come from? - On Wednesday, December 12, I’ll be presenting a session with fellow Redgater Richard Macaskill at our free online conference, SQL in the City Streamed. Richard and I will be talking about “Crucial data privacy and protection insights for 2019” at 1:55 ......(more)

Data Mining/Data Analysis

How to solve a business problem using data - For those of you who know me, you’ll know that I spend a great deal of time focusing on our teams mission to democratize data. For background, I’ve written and spoken in a number of venues about what a data democracy means and how to execute this vision. ...(more)

Conferences, Classes, and Events

PASS, Meetup, and Sponsors - I’ve always been in favor of trying to use the PASS tools and web site as much as possible, but it’s hard to argue again the discoverability of Meetup. Certainly we get people joining the list via PASS, but we seem to get more new people that actually ......(more)

Career Growth

Journaling - Most of the work I’ve done for the past couple years doesn’t require taking much in the way of notes. One tab in Notepad++ for misc ideas and reminders (auto save is nice), then put the stuff that needs to be tracked into Trello and it’s good enough, ......(more)

New Power BI skill assessment on Pluralsight - I’m quite excited to announce the new Power BI skills assessment on Pluralsight is in beta. This assessment is the result of me spending dozens of hours writing questions and some wonderful peer review by Gilbert Quevauvillie. Please do me a favor and ......(more)

Epic Life Quest – looking back - This will be my last post for the year. In this am going to look back on goals I set for myself over past two years, how well I’ve done, and what I plan to do in the year ahead.The idea of epic life quest was started (in community) by Steve Jones and ......(more)

Three Books That Have Influenced My Career - (Originally published on Simple Talk at https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/blogs/three-books-that-have-influenced-my-career/) I’m a lifelong learner. One of the ways I love to learn is by reading books. While I was making the transition to software ......(more)

Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL DB is Slow: Do I Need to Buy More DTUs? - You’ve got an Azure SQL DB, and your queries are going slow. You’re wondering, “Am I hitting the performance limits? Is Microsoft throttling my queries?” There’s an easy way to check: run sp_BlitzFirst. sp_BlitzFirst is our free performance health check ......(more)

Azure SQL Database “Step By Step” Tutorials - I would like to share a link to my Azure SQL Database Stairway series hosted over at SQLServerCentral. As stated on the website a stairway guide is a series focused on a single topic and is arranged into no more … Continue reading ? ...(more)

Move to Azure Resource Manager REST APIs for Azure SQL Database - Some customers already noticed that we are retiring Azure Service Manager REST APIs for Azure SQL Database on December 1, 2019 and may get confused about what this means. In case you haven't seen the notice yet, you can take a look at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/move-to-azure-resource-manager-rest-apis-for-azure-sql-database/ We ......(more)

Azure Analysis Services

Extended Events with Azure Analysis Services - Its almost standard fare to be using Azure Analysis Services with our customer deployments these days. As our customers evolve the value of their data. SSIS integration runtimes were pivotal to this and now that there is Azure Analysis Services, it’s ......(more)

AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services

Alphabet's DeepMind AI Algorithm Wins Protein-Folding Contest - DeepMind, the artificial-intelligence company owned by Google parent company Alphabet Inc., has created an algorithm that won a competition for predicting the complex, three-dimensional shapes into which proteins can be folded. (Bloomberg) -- DeepMind, ......(more)

Microsoft Calls for Laws to Prevent Bias in Facial Recognition AI - Microsoft thinks current facial recognition technology increases the risk of biased outcomes, can lead to new intrusions into privacy and can encroach on democratic freedoms if used for mass government surveillance. ...(more)

The Future of NLP in Data Science - According to many market statistics, data volume is doubling every two years, but in future this time span may get further reduced. The vast portion of this data (about 79 percent) is text data. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the sub-branch of ......(more)

Figure Eight Machine Learning Models Now Available on AWS Marketplace - According to a recent press release, “Figure Eight, the essential Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning (ML) platform, today announced that its production-quality ML algorithms and models will be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace for Machine ......(more)

Administration of SQL Server

Capture the Flag – The Trace Flag - Many people work in a tightly controlled environment. Every change requires a change control form and approval to make a change. In some environments, things are more lax, but you still wish you could tell when certain changes were made. That is even ......(more)

Overview of Data Compression in SQL Server - The database is a critical and vital part of any business or organization. The growing trends predict that 82% of enterprises expect the number of databases to increase over the next 12 months. A major challenge of every DBA is to discover how to tackle ......(more)

SQL SERVER – Unable to Uninstall – Index was Outside the Bounds of the Array - This was an interesting error which I received while trying to uninstall SQL Server. In this blog, we would learn how to fix error Index was outside the bounds of the array, which might come during uninstallation of SQL Server. I must say this was an ......(more)

SQL SERVER – SETUP Error: The Syntax of Argument “/ACTION” is Incorrect - Recently, I was trying to uninstall SQL Server via command prompt and faced an interesting situation. In this blog, we would learn about the error “The syntax of argument “/ACTION” is incorrect” and how to fix it. THE SITUATION As I mentioned in one ......(more)

Enabling Query Store - Performance tuning in SQL Server is one of the main jobs a DBA has. Starting with SQL Sever 2016 a great tuning tool can be turned on for databases called Query Store. Query Store is a product designed to help you tune queries based on performance and ......(more)

Useful T-SQL queries and scripts to work in SQL Server - This post is about some queries and scripts that I use in my daily work on SQL Server. Some of them are self-explanatory, i.e. the name of the query/script already describes its purpose. However, if you need to get some more details around, then you ......(more)

Capture the Flag – The Trace Flag - Enjoy this republication of my original article originally posted at SQL Solutions Group. Many people work in a tightly controlled environment. Every change requires a change control form and approval to make a change. In some environments, things are ......(more)

Fun with SQL Server Plan Cache, Trace Flag 8666, and Trace Flag 2388 - Ok, last one for a while. This time, pulling the stats relevant to a plan from the plan XML in the plan cache (thanks to trace flag 8666), then getting a little bit of stats update history via trace flag 2388.I'm not particularly happy with performance; ......(more)

Fun with SQL Server Query Store, Query Plan 'StatisticsInfo' XML nodes, and STATS_STREAM - Note: The stored procedure in this post works with SQL Server 2016 SP2++ and on planXML for plans NOT using the Legacy CE. There will be a future post with a version using trace flag 8666 style planXML, which can be used prior to SQL Server 2016 SP2 ......(more)

Navigating SQL Server Error Logs - Introduction One of the key skills you need as a database administrator or an IT person is generally the ability to monitor systems very carefully. Lack of this key skill can lead to misdiagnosis when troubleshooting issues. SQL Server exposes a number ......(more)

SQL SERVER – Small Backup for Large Database - Recently, I had a very interesting experience with one of my customer while working with them on Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check. The issue was related to small backup for the large database and it was so much interesting I decided to ......(more)

How to Log Active Queries with sp_BlitzWho - Queries are running when you’re not around. They’re wreaking havoc – maybe they’re filling up your TempDB, or causing blocking, or flushing your buffer pool out. When I wanna see what queries are running, I run sp_BlitzWho: That shows me who’s running ......(more)

Deadlocks in a SQL Server Database - Deadlocks in SQL Server happen when 2 (maybe more) processes are fighting over a resource in the database and are trying to obtain an exclusive lock on that resource. When SQL Server decides to pick a process to become it’s deadlock victim, it is an ......(more)

Three tips to help your database team avoid burn out this holiday season - As you’re enjoying the festivities this month, spare a thought for your database administrators and IT teams. It’s one of the busiest and most stressful times of the year for them. They’re the ones running around making sure all the systems for profit ......(more)