A community of more than 1,600,000 database professionals and growing

The Voice of the DBA

Spend More on Security

In technology, quite a few companies are doing well. In fact, it's a regular race among Apple and Microsoft to see who's the world's more valuable company. However, quite a few other companies in other industries are also doing very well. Many have reported strong earnings in the last couple years. Many of those same companies have had data breaches.

I saw this tweet from Buck Woody, which says " Another day, another breach. C'mon companies, get your act together. Spend a bit of that record profit on security. We're tired of this."

I agree. As someone who's stayed at an SPG hotel, I'd guess my data has been leaked. I'm also guessing that my credit card has been changed since then, since I think I end up changing them once a year because of some data breach. Still, I think that shouldn't be a habit I have.

Companies need to spend more than "a bit" on security. They need to better train their IT staff on secure coding and configuration as well as on tools to support those habits and processes. They also need to devote some time and money to fixing past security issues. No system should be immune from patching because of fears that an application stops working. Either internal developers need to test better, or vendor contracts need to specify that software purchased will support platform security patches, which often means the vendors need to ensure that service packs and patches don't break their products.

We need to demand more as consumers and technical people, including demanding more of ourselves. Building secure systems is hard. Writing secure code requires we change habits and sometimes do a bit more work. It's something we all need to learn to do better.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.2MB) 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.

How to track every change to your SQL Server database

See who’s changing your database, alongside affected objects, date, time, and reason for the change with SQL Source Control. Get a full change history in your source control system. Learn more

CI/CD for your SQL Server database

Feeling the pain of managing and deploying database changes manually? Redgate SQL Change Automation completes your database delivery process by building, testing, and deploying the database changes you and your team check into version control.
Try it free

Featured Contents

Removing Extended Properties

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

With the new labeling and classificiation options in SQL Server, there might be a need to remove these labels before deploying the database. More »

Building Better Test Data with SQL Provision

In this article, Microsoft MVP Steve Jones shows how SQL Provision can help create test data that complies with regulations that prohibit the sharing of sensitive or personal data, but still looks and behaves like the real deal. More »

Data Quality

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Problems with data quality are easier and cheaper to prevent than to solve later. In this article, Joe Celko talks about data quality and where the issues tend to happen. More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Information Measurement with SQL Server Part 4.3: Euclidean Distance and the Minkowski Family

SQLServerSteve from SQLServerCentral Blogs

By Steve Bolton …………“The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” …………In this famous remark, Archimedes[1] (287-212 B.C.) managed to... More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - SHUTDOWN SQL Server

Jason Brimhall from SQLServerCentral Blogs

Recently a friend by the name of Chris Bell (blog | twitter) wrote about an easy way to disrupt SQL Server.... More »

Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

Which of the following is true if you drop a temporary table in a stored procedure?

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.
This question is worth 1 point in this category: Temp tables.

We'd love to give you credit for your own question and answer.
To submit a QOTD, simply log in to the Contribution Center.

Expert T-SQL Window Functions in SQL Server

Expert T-SQL Window Functions in SQL Server takes you from any level of knowledge of windowing functions and turns you into an expert who can use these powerful functions to solve many T-SQL queries. Replace slow cursors and self-joins with queries that are easy to write and fantastically better performing, all through the magic of window functions. Get your copy from Amazon today.

Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

I have a data frame of the all time home run hitting leaders in baseball. I want to get some quick statistical looks at the data frame (HR.hitters). What function lets me quickly get an idea of the min, max, mean, and median?

Answer: summary(HR.hitters)

Explanation:

The Summary function will get me a summar of the data frame, showing the min, max, and some statistical values such as median and mean.

Ref: summary() - click here

» Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.

SQL Server 2017 : SQL Server 2017 - Development

Merge Tables with SQL Query Request - Hello Community, Can someone please take a look at the following tables and let me know how to compile a sql...

SQL Server Job which downloads the files using Script Task fails after few runs on the Agent - I have an SSIS Package which uses a script task to download some zip files daily from websites. The Package is...

SQL Server 2016 : SQL Server 2016 - Administration

Queries to practice compilation and recompilation. - Hi expert, Can someone please post here some quires (or simulate recompilation) to practice compilation/recompilation? I would really appreciate. Thanks,

Decode waits on Object resource - Hello everyone, One of our servers is experiencing locks on particular objects of a production database, like for an example OBJECT: 7:480772820:27....

Looking to downgrade our SQL Server editions from Enterprise to Standard Edition - We're looking to downgrade our SQL Server editions from Enterprise to Standard. Contacted our vendors, they all signed off they...

Error: 15006 'username' not a valid name because ... - Dear I'm new to SQL and trying to learn the basic in a practical way. The error: TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio ------------------------------ Create...

SQL Server 2016 : SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

Looping Through Data - Hello, I'm new to SQL. This is what I'm trying to do. If Caller and Call Type is same within the table...

Set @rptStartDate = CASE WHEN 'TransactionCount' = 2 Then '11/1/2018' - 30 days Else '11/1/2018' End - Hello again! The issue I am having today is dealing with a date change when certain conditions are met. As...

Error: Cannot insert duplicate key row in... a non-unique index?! - Cannot insert duplicate key row in object 'Payment' with unique index 'IX_Payment_PurchaseId'. The duplicate key value is (2999, C1234, 2018-12-13,...

Text data type - Is it still supported by SS 2016? Thanks

SQL Server 2014 : Development - SQL Server 2014

Run away logical reads on stored proc causing timeouts. - Hi, I am hoping some one maybe have any insight or suggestions. I have a stored proc that returns 10 to 200...

SQL Server 2012 : SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL

Find the root cause of SQL Server slowness and possibly killing blockers automatically - Hi, we have noticed this morning around 9:30 AM EST that our applications became unresponsive. we started getting emails from SQL...

SQL Server 2008 : T-SQL (SS2K8)

PERCENTILE_DISC for median calculation - Question: is PERCENTILE_DISC for median calculation works for both odd and even number of records? In SQL Server 2008 to calculate...

WHERE 1 = 1 - I am afraid I am really going to show my newbie-ness with this question … I see lots of stored procedures...

Cloud Computing : SQL Azure - Development

SSIS from Premise to Azure connection login timeout - I setup a nightly job to load data from a database on premise to Azure. The SSIS runs successfully intermittently, but sometime it...

Programming : XML

Problem reading all Attributes into SQL table - Hello everyone. I'm writing a proc that imports several XML files and stores them in a SQL table. Here's a sample...

SQLServerCentral.com : Articles Requested

QueryStore practical everyday use - Hi We have been using QueryStore since day 1 of our SQLServer 2016 installation For every day usage though, the standard...

SQL Server 2005 : T-SQL (SS2K5)

Date Format (mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm), no seconds or milliseconds - Does anyone know syntax to use to format a date field with as follows (02/09/2009 14:34)? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Jeff

SQL Server 7,2000 : Data Corruption

I/O error 170(The requested resource is in use.) - Hi all I have some problems with one environment.. It was a virtual cluster active/passive with 2 virtual nodes and virtual disk...

SQL Server 7,2000 : T-SQL

T-SQL code to group data into comma delimited column - hi All, I have a view v_Newsletter with has two columns email and newsletter. There are some emails which has subscribed...

This email has been sent to newsletter@newslettercollector.com. To be removed from this list, please click here.
If you have any problems leaving the list, please contact the webmaster@sqlservercentral.com.

This newsletter was sent to you because you signed up at SQLServerCentral.com.
Feel free to forward this to any colleagues that you think might be interested.
If you have received this email from a colleague, you can register to receive it here.