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The Voice of the DBA

Virtual Data

Yesterday I republished an editorial from 2014 for the holiday. The topic was production subsets of data, which has been something that many data professionals have struggled with for years. Many of us have built scripts to delete, change, obfuscate, or alter production restores as a way of providing useful, but manageable development database sets. Or maybe it's just some of us. I'm sure more than a few of us have given up on this task and just restored production databases in entirety to test and development systems.

I changed over my career to become a fan of additively building a known dataset rather than deleting extra data. I advocate adding rows from production (properly masked/obfuscated) and maintaining this set over time as requirements change. However, this isn't without it's own administrative headaches. I think it's easier, but this does require commitment from everyone to keep going over time. It's certainly better than each developer adding their own 10 rows of data to a table for testing.

A year ago, Redgate released SQL Clone, designed to solve some of these issues. Once an image is created, new databases for test and development and be provisioned in seconds. I found this to be an amazing product that really changes how I develop against databases, though it does require me to stop getting caught up trying to undo changes or manage a single database. Instead, I need to ensure I am saving code to version control and then build the habit to drop and rebuild a baseline database.

As we've worked on SQL Clone, I've found that there are lots of companies that offer similar ways of virtualizing your data, giving you access to large, production scale systems in seconds. Data masking, obfuscation, and more are features, with some vendors requiring specific hardware. Others, like Red Gate, have software add-ons (Data Masker).  All of these products cost money, which can be an issue for many organizations, but I'm glad that this technology is growing and advancing. With GDPR and other draft legislation, many of us need to take better care of our data and build more secure architectures.

Containers are another interesting way to virtualiza data, though they don't solve the scale issues. If you can work with a smaller data set, and maintain that, then containers might provide a fantastic way for you to learn to build, teardown, and rebuild databases in seconds. 

The world of databases hasn't changed a lot in some ways across my career, but in others, I'm amazed. Data virtualization is one of these areas, and if you haven't trialed the technology, maybe you should give it a whirl this year.

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 ( 3.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn. feed

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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Featured Contents

 

Solve Sudoku with TSQL - Part 1 - a single select

bevan ward from SQLServerCentral.com

A Sudoku solution can be resolved using a single select statement. The first article shows this method and next how this can be optimised to resolve complex puzzles in seconds. More »


 

How to Move a TDE Encryption Key to Another SQL Server Instance

Additional Articles from Database Journal

If you have a database backup of a Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enabled database, the database backup will contain encrypted data. Because the database backup contains encrypted data you can’t just restore it to any instance. You can only restore the database backup to an instance that contains the same certificate used to originally encrypt the database. More »


 

Sign up for more free training from Redgate

Redgate has committed to hosting a free virtual event in every quarter of 2018, and will be kicking this off on February 28 with a livestream themed around data privacy and protection. The agenda has now been released, so you can see who will be presenting, what they will be presenting, and how you can tune in to watch. More »


 

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Power BI Custom Visuals Class (Module 89 – Filter by List)

Devin Knight from SQLServerCentral Blogs

In this module you will learn how to use the Filter by List Custom Visual. The Filter by List allows... More »


 

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - gdpr - panic part 4

Ed Elliott from SQLServerCentral Blogs

In the first part of this series, we looked at where to find out more information about GDPR in the... More »

Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

I want to set some session key-value pairs using sp_set_session_context. Since this might be used in a number of places in my application, I'm concerned that developers might set too many pairs. What is the maximum amount of data I can store with this feature?

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

If I run this code, what is returned?

SELECT @@OPTIONS

Answer: an integer

Explanation:

@@OPTIONS returns a binary value that represents a bitmap of your SET options. You can convert this to binary to see a representation fo the options..

Ref: @@OPTIONS - click here


» Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Featured Script

A framework to backup databases on Availability Groups

Gaby Abed from SQLServerCentral.com

This script generates a health status of each db in an AG (and list of DBs not in AG) and uses an IF/THEN block to check if the synchronization_state_desc is healthy. Feel free to insert in the part marked INSERT BACKUP CODE HERE your preferred backup scripts, or trusted third party ones such as Ola Hallengren's.  Please note, this is very rough, and does not check for other criteria such as the DB being online, and what kind of backup (Full, Diff, Tlog) is required, but hopefully this will be usefuI.
Ideally, this script and modifications can be wrapped in a proc that is deployed to all servers, both standalone and those in HA's, as a job.  In theory, if you want, you can backup the transaction logs on the secondary, and full on primary.  This would require a bit of a tweak with the IF/THEN block.

More »

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 - Administration

Backups - AlwaysON Availabilty Groups - Hello, I'm studying Windows Server Failover Clustering for a SQL Server Availability Groups with 2 instances and another node as a...


SQL Server 2017 : SQL Server 2017 - Development

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SQL Server 2016 : SQL Server 2016 - Administration

Transaction Log Growth - Hi, I am currently using Ola Hallengren's backup solution for my backups on a SQL Server 2016 Standard instance. I have...

Showplan - Started a new role, have limited (read) rights to the server, I have asked for showplan rights but have been...

word for create a dev server - I have a question about a correct term or word I should use; When we have a production server, and later...


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

SELECT TOP X vs Offset Fetch? Want to limit query results but not force a sort and scan? - I am making some views to use for AdHoc reporting and wanted to put a 100K row limit on them. However,...

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Performance improvement following a disable indexes, shrink, enable indexes - but why? - I'm stumped and need the assistance of the wider community to understand what is going on. The database in question has...


SQL Server 2014 : Administration - SQL Server 2014

Adding multiple triggers to same table - Recommendations/Best Practices - Hi Folks, I have a requirement to add additional triggers(INSERT/UPDATE) for a table which already have INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE triggers. This is for...

Data Files (mdf) - Hi  Is it possible to  combine two or three  database mdf files to one file. Thanks


SQL Server 2012 : SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL

finding the right index - We use a program for EDI in our company.  One of the screens shows us a list of sent documents. ...

Need to get consecutive duplicate rows - I need a query that can get me (the ID of) consecutive duplicate rows, where I am grouping on some...


SQL Server 2008 : SQL Server 2008 High Availability

Regarding Mirroring setup - TCP/IP network issue - Hi Team, I tried setting up DB mirroring between PRD & DR side and I am getting the below error. I checked firewall,...

SQL server 2008 R2 frequent transaction log full and my database is a mirrored one. - I have 1 pair of identical server with SQL server 2008 R2 is installed.I have 2 databases in it which...


SQL Server 2008 : SQL Server 2008 Performance Tuning

Very erratic performance in last few days. - I apologize for such a general question, and there is not enough info for a detailed answer, but ANY general...


Reporting Services : Reporting Services

Line chart from table containing static values - Hello everyone! I have a SSRS 2016 report, which contains a dataset that produces a basic table as follows: Department    2014    2015    2016    2017 ========    ====   ====   ====   ==== Department A       ...


Data Warehousing : Integration Services

Need idea on exporting column data to separate file -ssis - Hi all,     I need a help to generate XML file from a table output and  Create main folder and subfolder...


Data Warehousing : Strategies and Ideas

Data Warehouse Design - Issue with 1:M Dimension - Hi, I am building a Data Warehouse that will store report data from a 3rd party system. The system report data...


Data Warehousing : Data Transformation Services (DTS)

Stripping out double quotes (") in bulk insert - We have a client that's still on SQL Server 6.5 (yes, I know, I struggled to remember that far back too!),...

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