The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News

Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge

I’ve always been a goal-setter. Once I get an idea in mind, it’s hard to stop me until I reach the finish line. Most of the time, the goals have been good ideas, but not always. For example, I decided on a career path as a teenager. I dutifully completed the training and requirements and worked in the field – unhappily -- for sixteen years before managing to make a switch to something more suitable. Many people working in IT have similar stories: choosing something with poor employment prospects or ending up in a field they didn’t enjoy. People in the Data Platform community have so many interesting stories to tell about how they ended up in technology after starting out as social workers, secretaries, or mathematics teachers to name a few.

Deciding on an entire career path is an enormous goal that takes years to accomplish. It must be broken down into smaller steps such as applying to a university, coming up with funds to pay for the degree, attending classes for several years, passing the courses, graduating, and taking any required professional board exams. Fortunately, for most IT careers, a non-related degree – or no degree at all – will suffice, but there are still many steps to achieve success.

Most of the goals that people make are much smaller, like catching up with the latest features of SQL Server or starting a blog. And, of course, many people set goals related to their health and fitness. About ten years ago, I decided to run a half-marathon. I trained for several months and completed the event with an acceptable time. Once it was done, I lost interest in running. That wasn’t the original plan; I had hoped that I would run a couple of half-marathons a year, but it ended up being just box that I checked.

Many people are motivated by fresh starts. Graduations, Mondays, or the New Year are occasions to improve our lives, begin new projects, get healthier, or start down that new career path. Big or small, goals seem more attractive when we feel we can wipe the slate clean. Unfortunately, many people abandon goals within a few days or weeks, especially those to do with fitness. It’s difficult to form new habits, and that is what it takes to be successful.

Have you decided to set some goals for this New Year? Tell us about it in the comments.

Kathi Kellenberger 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

Webcast: Data Modeling Scenarios and Best Practices - On January 17, 2019, I will be giving a webcast with MSSQLTips on data modeling best practices. It’s scheduled for 3 PM EST (8 PM UTC). Here’s the link to register: Register for Data Modeling Scenarios and Best Practices (free) Here’s what I’ll be talking ......(more)

Proactive SQL Server Performance Tuning - Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2019Time: 02:00 PM Eastern Standard TimeDuration: 1 hour Don’t wait for performance issues to become a problem. Be proactive by analyzing and addressing SQL Server performance issues before they ever happen. Ready to learn ......(more)

Virtualization and Containers

Building A Kubernetes Cluster For SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters, Part 2: Kubernetes Cluster Creation - Part 1 of this series covered the creation of the virtual machines that will act as nodes for our cluster and an additional virtual machines from which the cluster will be bootstrapped. There are a variety of tools for building clusters, including Kops, ......(more)

T-SQL

Talking T-SQL (among Many Other Enterprise SQL Server Topics) - Microsoft experts discuss the current state of cloud adoption, T-SQL enhancements, the evolution of enterprise SQL Server performance tuning and mentorship. ...(more)

Finding Max Concurrent Operations With T-SQL (Part 1) - Not too long ago, a co-worker had an issue that he asked me about.  The gist of it is, we can have multiple concurrent work items processing for a customer, but we want to limit that number to 2.  The development team wanted to make sure that their code ......(more)

Tech News

10 Future Technology Predictions to Watch in 2019 - Our team at ITPro Today talks to industry experts about their future technology predictions, and share how these trends will impact storage, mobility and cybersecurity. ...(more)

Security news and thoughts

Do 75% of data breaches really come from “insiders”? - There’s a lot of information out there on data breaches. I’ve written before about one source that I trust — the Verizon Data Breach Report (DBIR). The 2018 DBIR studied a sample of 2,216 confirmed data breaches, and of these it found that 28% involved ......(more)

2018 Threat Intelligence Report - Threat intelligence has become a significant weapon in the fight against cybersecurity threats, and a large majority of organizations have made it a key part of their security programs. This threat intelligence report, produced by Cybersecurity Insid ......(more)

Linux Servers Appear Most Affected by IPMI Enabled JungleSec Ransomware Attacks - Linux servers top the list of victims to a ransomware attack that seems to take advantage of poorly configured IPMI devices. ...(more)

Press Releases

Redgate giving something back – 2018 highlights - Giving something back is an important part of Redgate. We even have our own Give Something Back team who coordinate Redgate’s charity activities. We especially like to support and donate to local charities, but we also support international charities, ......(more)

PowerShell

powershell splatting - Splatting in PowerShell makes code easier to read. Instead of typing a bunch of parameters allllll across the screen, you can use an easy-to-read hashtable or array. Argument splatting was introduced in PowerShell v3 and works with all PowerShell commands, ......(more)

PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI

Interviews from PASS Summit 2018: Matthew Roche, Matt Masson, Adam Saxton & Patrick LeBlanc - I had a chance to catch up with two of the three Matts from the Power BI product team at PASS Summit 2018.  Speaking with Matthew Roche and Matt Masson about the new Power BI Dataflows announcement, they told me that Power Query is becoming a truly enterprise-class ......(more)

Best Book for Learning the M Language - Late in 2018 there was a new Power Query book written by Gil Raviv called Collect, Combine and Transform Data Using Power Query in Excel and Power BI.  That’s a bit of a mouthful actually; maybe the title was influenced by the same people that call Power ......(more)

Performance Tuning SQL Server

Why Do Some Indexes Create Faster Than Others? - To warn you ahead of time, this post is an exploration without an answer (yet). There’s some interesting stuff in here, but no conclusions. If that’s not your kind of post, feel free to skip it. If it is, well, here goes nothin’… Wild, Wild Life Creating ......(more)

SQL Homework – January 2019 – Baselines - Happy New Year! Every year for New Years we all make a big deal of coming up with New Years Resolutions. Here’s one from me to you. Baselines Why are baselines important? Have you ever heard The server is slow? Is it? Can you be sure? I mean what exactly ......(more)

Let’s talk SQL Server Waits: Topic 1 – SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD - Over the next few weeks we will be reviewing some of the common SQL Server Waits. We will explain what they mean and some basic things to resolve the waits. This week we will review SOS_SCHEDULER_YEILD wait. This wait is associated to how SQL Server ......(more)

From adaptive to intelligent: query processing in SQL 2019 - This page contains the description for my conference session “From adaptive to intelligent: query processing in SQL 2019”, and links to the slide deck and demo code used in this presentation. Description Target audience Experienced database developers ......(more)

ETL/SSIS/Azure Data Factory

Integration Services Catalog package errors - Short post today… My client makes extensive use of SSIS and deploys the packages to the Integration Services Catalog (ISC), and runs them via hundreds of jobs. When one of the jobs fail, I have to go get the details. Job History doesn’t have it. So my ......(more)

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Enforcing security controls right from CI/CD pipeline with AzSK – Deep Dive - Azure Security Kit  aka AzSK is a framework that is used internally by Microsoft to control & govern their Azure Subscriptions. While some features are overlapping with Azure Security Center, I find a lot of value in the Kit, mostly in the following ......(more)

DBA Tools

How to use tSQLt unit test framework with a SQL Server database in a docker container - This blog post describes how to add the tSQLt unit testing framework to a database running in a docker container. You may have already read my article on how easy it is to install against a ‘normal’ SQL Server instance – running on windows… How to install ......(more)

Data Science

Data Science Trends in 2019 - When it comes to major Data Science trends to watch in 2019, the co-founder and CEO of Kaggle, Anthony Goldbloom, has predicted that very soon Data Centers will be replaced by departmental or business-specific Data Science teams. As discussed in Data ......(more)

Data Mining/Data Analysis

Does Data Democratization Result in Data Anarchy and Bad Business Decisions? - One of the most common excuses used to avoid Data Democratization and Self-serve Augmented Data Discovery is that the organization cannot guarantee data integrity and that, if business users have access ......(more)

Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google , AWS)

Lesson Learned #52: Azure Database for MySQL – Server is not configured to allow ipv6 connections - Hello, Several days ago, I worked in a service request that our customer had configured all elements ( VPN, Site-to-Site, etc…) but they are getting an error: ERROR 9009 (28000): Server is not configured to allow ipv6 connections trying to connect using ......(more)

Career Growth

10 Personal Finance Lessons for Technology Professionals - Patience.Frugality.Sacrifice.When you boil it down, what do those three things have in common? ......(more)

Resolve to be a “learn it all” with new Azure Certifications! - Happy New Year! Hopefully I'm not the first to wish you that, especially if you are reading this in July. A new year is associated with the chance to start fresh and resolve to change ......(more)

2018 Community Influencer of the Year - A few days ago I was surprised to learn from Aaron Bertrand of SentryOne that he was selecting me as Community Influencer of the Year for 2018. Aaron states that the Community Influencer of the Year award goes to, “someone who has made a dramatic impact ......(more)

Refocusing My 2019 Plans: Letting Go of Consulting - When last we met, dear reader, I was super excited that I’d broken $500K in Black Friday sales – a goal that I’d been working on for a while. I was really proud of that. That moment triggered a lot of introspection, though. In my post about year 6 of ......(more)

Big Data

3 Common Analytics Use Cases for Azure Databricks - Pragmatic Works is considered to be experts in the Microsoft Data Platform, both on-premises and in Azure. That being said, we often get asked many questions like, how can a certain technology benefit my company? One technology we are asked about a lot ......(more)

Migrating & Scaling Machine Learning Models to Azure Databricks for Cloud-Powered AI - Needing to scale up your predictive power and data processing capabilities, but a bit apprehensive about moving awesome machine learning models to a new platform? No need to worry! In today's post, I'll show you the easy way to migrate and scale machine ......(more)

Want to Learn More About Azure Data Factory? - From me? Getting Started with Azure Data Factory I am honored to announce Getting Started with Azure Data Factory – a course from Enterprise Data & Analytics! The next delivery is 04 Mar 2019, 9:00 AM – 4:30 PM ET. Azure Data Factory, or ADF, is an ......(more)

Azure SQL Managed Instance

Lesson Learned #51: Managed Instance – Import via Sqlpackage.exe doesn’t allow autogrow - Some days ago, I have been working in a service request that our customer faced the following issue: They've downloaded the newest version of Sqlpackage.exe tool (18.0) and they're trying to import a bacpac into their Azure SQL Managed Instance. It ......(more)

AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services

Robots Aren't Yet Killing Off All Our Jobs, World Bank Says - The rise of automation has so far had a negligible impact on jobs at a global scale, the World Bank chief economist said, despite common gloomy predictions that humans are set to be replaced by machines. ...(more)

Microsoft, Google Use Artificial Intelligence to Fight Hackers - Microsoft, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and various startups are moving away from solely using older “rules-based” technology designed to respond to specific kinds of intrusion and deploying machine-learning algorithms that crunch massive ......(more)

The Future of AI, Voice Assistants, and Augmented Intelligence in 2019 - Voice Assistants have been hovering in the background for some time now, but 2019 will be the year we see unprecedented leaps forward in their intelligence and functionality. They have been building ......(more)

Create Microsoft Flow Part 2- Face Recognition by Power Apss, Microsoft Flow and Cognitive Service - In this series the process of how to create a simple applicaiton for facial recognition has been explained. In the last post, the process of creating Power apps for taking the photo has been explained. In this post, the process of creating face recognition ......(more)

Administration of SQL Server

SQLs Black Box Recorder – sp_server_diagnostics - Yesterday i shared the first article in a three part series about the SQL Black Box Recorder, that you can read here, with a promise of at least two more posts. The first article in the series laid the groundwork about the black box recorder in SQL Server. ...(more)

Auto-Email System to Send Database Summary Report - Database monitoring is the most essential job of any database administrator. Big organizations and companies have multiple database servers that are located either in the same data center or in the geographically different data centers. There are many ......(more)

Introduction to SQL Server Security — Part 1 - Security can be one of the most complex issues to contend with when managing a SQL Server instance, yet it’s also one of the most important, especially when sensitive and personal data are on the line. In fact, for many organizations, security is their ......(more)

SQL SERVER – Which Settings Change in sp_configure Needs Restart to Take Effect? - Learning one new thing every day keeps me passionate about my job. Recently, I had a very interesting experience with one of my customer while working with them on Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check and found some non-default values in sp_configure. ...(more)

Unattended installation of SQL Server - It is a third post on series related to installation and configuration of SQL Server installations. This series is for professionals who start their journey with SQL Server administration and also for those who want to extend and structure their knowledge ......(more)