The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News

Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge

There's a fascinating piece over at O'Reilly that looks at what we might consider Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be. The discussion looks at Deep Blue, Watson, and AlphaGo, all of which have defeated humans in game competitions where we might expect some intelligence is needed. We could argue that, but certainly these computing machines have done more to display knowledge than the best humans at certain endeavors.

What is interesting is that each of these machines, while very competent in their area, is specialized. AlphaGo can't play chess, nor can DeepBlue play Go. Each has been tuned to a specialized area, and also trained to excel in that area. This isn't fundamentally different than humans that train and specialize themselves, though certainly we find humans have more capabilities in a general sense (for now) than machines.

As we look to grow intelligence, however, there is one thing that's commonly needed in both artificial or machine intelligence and human intelligence: data. Whether a human is training themselves to solve a particular problem, compete in a game, or even excel in a sport, they need lots of data. We gather this with our senses as well as by examining what others have one, contemplating actions, trying out different actions, ideas, or concepts, and then adjusting to improve.

This is what researchers are also trying to do with gaming machines, with self-driving cars, and even with bots. That last item is interesting to me, as I haven't paid much attention to bots. A long conversation with another SQL professional got me interested in, and intrigued by, the idea of software robots that might handle various complex tasks better than the FAQ method that so many applications and websites use. I wasn't sure these would be useful, but I have found the Slackbot to be more helpful than the help or searches for some tasks.

There's work to be done, and I know the Slackbot (and other machine intelligence software) needs to be trained better. This requires data. Lots of data, and possibly lots of hand holding from a human. For many areas, such as relatively low level customer support or problem solving, I wonder if a bot could be trained to work better than the simple decision tree algorithms like those found in the Windows Troubleshooter.

There are various ways we might grow this software to help us, and make no mistake, we will need to grow it. Plenty of businesses are becoming excited about machine learning, the R language or Python, software bots, and more. In all the cases of implementing these systems, the one demand that will impact many of us is the need for lots of data. Data that's organized, that is relevant, that we can use to separate out successes from failures, and evaluate our particular problem better. We will need to group data into knowledge, and then feed it into software.

I think this is a bit different than how most of us have used data over the years. We've often collected, manipulated, aggregated, summarized, and spit data back out to (ultimately) some human that can make a decision. Most of us haven't worked with sending data to a machine intelligence and somehow then helping it to understand how to respond on make a decision.

My suspicion is there will be lots of work for us in the next decade in helping machines to use data and understand it, maybe even to use them to help us gather, organize, clean, and manipulate data better ourselves. It's an exciting time to be a data professional, and I'm sure some of you will work on a few very exciting projects in the future.

Steve Jones 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.

Tech News : General Interest

What is Artificial Intelligence? - Mike Loukides and Ben Lorica examine factors that have made AI a hot topic in recent years, today's successful AI systems, and where AI may be headed in the coming years. The State of Artificial Intelligence Defining artificial intelligence isn’t just ......(more)

Tech News : Security

High-severity bugs in 25 Symantec/Norton products imperil millions - Much of the product line from security firm Symantec contains a raft of vulnerabilities that expose millions of consumers, small businesses, and large organizations to self-replicating attacks that take complete control of their computers, ......(more)

Tech News : The Lighter Side

Electric Vehicles at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb: Race report - Despite a blown engine that prevented any running on the Friday before the race—and an epic case of jet lag after winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans the week before—Romain Dumas was ......(more)

This chatbot appeals parking tickets and wins 60 percent of the time - Joshua Browder, a 19-year-old British student at Stanford University, has created a chatbot (DoNotPay.co.uk) that successfully challenged parking tickets in London and New York City. The chat interface asks a few basic questions and then auto-generates ......(more)

SQL Server News

Released: System Center Management Pack for SQL Server, Replication, AS, RS, Dashboards (6.7.2.0) - We are happy to announce that Management Packs to monitor SQL Server 2016 product family and updates to existing Management Packs have been released! Only the English versions are available at this time. Localized Management Packs will be made available ......(more)

Microsoft News : General Interest

Microsoft's Windows 10: Anniversary Update to hit August 2; 350 million devices and counting - Microsoft will release Windows 10 on August 2 across the more than 350 million active devices where it is now running, and on other coming new PCs, phones, and more. ...(more)

Hardware News

HP Spectre 13 reviewed: Remarkably thin, but not light on power - Your smartphone isn't the only thing that companies are obsessed with making thinner. Focus has turned to laptops as well, with the belief that making thin-as-paper and light-as-air notebooks will draw ......(more)

Western Digital Rolls Out 256 GB SanDisk microSDXC Memory Cards - Coinciding with the Mobile World Congress at Shanghai, SanDisk owner Western Digital is introducing two new microSD memory cards that can store up to 256 GB of data. The new SanDisk-branded cards are designed for smartphones, tablets and content-capture ......(more)

The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 Review: Mobile Xeon Workstation - It’s been almost a year now since Lenovo first announced the new P50 and P70 mobile workstations, which were 15-inch and 17-inch notebooks, respectively. The part of the announcement which likely caused the most buzz was that Intel was now going to offer ......(more)

Blogs : Administration

Uninstalling SQL Server from the Command Line to Remove Unwanted Background Instances - I had a note (or ‘action item’) to make sure that people were informed regarding the ‘uninstall’ of SQL Server, since non-DBA server administrators would like to know more detail on this. The process is not obvious from Control Panels’ Programs and ......(more)

SQL Server 2016, Database Mail and .Net 3.5 Framework - There were so many cheers when Microsoft announced that the .Net 3.5 Framework was no longer a pre-requisite for installing SQL Server starting with SQL Server 2016. Folks were so excited, until they started testing certain pieces of the product, specifically ......(more)

SPLIT in a LEFT Partition Function: Where Does the Above-Boundary Data Go? - Table partitioning seems simple, but there’s a lot of complexity in designing and managing it if you decide to use filegroups and splitting. When you first implement partitioning in this scenario, you decide where you’re going to keep “out of bound” ......(more)

Index Usage Stats Insanity – sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats (Dear SQL DBA) - SQL Server’s “index usage stats” dynamic management view is incredibly useful– but does it tell you what you THINK it tells you? Kendra explains the quirks of how sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats works, as well as why she thinks the information is so valuable. This ......(more)

SQL Server Event Handling: Startup - The startup of an instance of SQL Server is a rare event. It only happens once for the life of the database engine process (sqlservr.exe). The timing of the event makes it appealing, though. It's an ideal opportunity to run T-SQL initialization tasks ......(more)

Blogs : Analysis Services / BI

Increasing Business Intelligence Competency in the C-Suite - by Angela Guess Larry Alton recently wrote in The American Genius, “Many companies are still lacking real business intelligence competence at the C-Suite level, and these companies risk falling behind in an era built on big data. So, how do we increase ......(more)

Blogs : Career

5 secrets for writing the perfect data scientist resume - No hype. No fluff. Just skills.Data scientists are in demand like never before, but nonetheless, getting a job as a data scientist requires a resume that shows off your skills. At The Data Incubator, we’ve received tens of thousands of resumes from applicants ......(more)

Is Today Your Last Day Working With SQL? - Please entertain this thought for a moment – If today was your last day working with SQL how would you spend it? Now, this post is assuming you, as the reader, are working with SQL in some form or fashion; however take the question and apply it to some ......(more)

Blogs : DMO/SMO/Powershell

Invoke-SqlCmd Just Got Better! - If you’ve read even just a few of my articles on Simple-Talk you know that I’m a big fan of PowerShell + SQL Server. Over the years I have written a lot about how to collect data from your SQL Servers and store it somewhere, maybe in a database, maybe ......(more)

SQL PowerShell: July 2016 update - This post was authored by Ayo Olubeko, Program Manager, Data Developer Group. The July update for SSMS includes the first substantial improvement in SQL PowerShell in many years. We owe a lot of thanks for this effort to the great collaboration with ......(more)

Blogs : High Availability/Disaster Recovery

Availability Group Direct Seeding: Extended Events and DMVs - As of this writing, this is all undocumented I’m super interested in this feature, so that won’t deter me too much. There have been a number of questions since Availability Groups became a thing about how to automate adding new databases. All of the ......(more)

Automatic Seeding Very Large Databases in SQL Server 2016 - There are a lot of new features in SQL Server 2016. Availability Groups by itself got a lot of new features. Being that I am the founder of the High Availability and Disaster Recovery Virtual Chapter, I plan on blogging about the new availability group ......(more)

Blogs : Integration Services/ETL

How to Use Zip With SSIS? – Notes from the Field #130 - [Note from Pinal]: This is a 130th episode of Notes from the Field series. In this episode we are going to learn something very simple but effective about SIS and Zip. This subject is not very much discussed about and hardly there are many information ......(more)

Blogs : PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI

Power BI Pulse Chart vs. Dancing bars in Excel - [2016-Jun-30] Recently Microsoft Power BI has been enhanced with a new Pulse Chart custom visualization (Visual Awesomeness Unlocked: Pulse Chart) which is extremely good and useful for a visual data story telling. I believe that the less we have people ......(more)

5 More Power BI Tips - I’ve had this blog post in my mind to write for the past month or so and I’m finally just getting around to it while I’m waiting to board my flight back home. Check out my first 5 Power BI Tips here These are just five more Power BI tips and tricks ......(more)

Blogs : R Language

Computerworld's advanced beginner's guide to R - Many newcomers to R got their start learning the language with Computerworld's Beginner's Guide to R, a 6-part introduction to the basics of the language. Now, budding R users who want to take their skills to the next level have a new guide to help them: ......(more)

How to write good tests in R - Testing is an often overlooked yet critical component of any software system. In some ways this is more true of models than traditional software. The reason is that computational systems must function correctly at both the system level and the model ......(more)

Blogs : Reporting Services

SSRS Subscriptions (What goes on “under the hood”) - One of the more difficult features to understand/troubleshoot that I’ve found in my experiences working with SSRS customers is the SSRS subscription functionality, especially the subscription processing piece of it before the report execution starts. ...(more)

Moving SSRS Reports between servers - Today, my friend Derik Hammer (blog|twitter) asked about moving SSRS reports between (versions and) instances of SSRS: This reminded me of a PowerShell script I wrote a few years back, so I’m dusting it off for this blog post. I’m far from a PowerShell ......(more)

Blogs : Security and Auditing

Data Security: Time to be Grown-Up - How do you quickly clear a room-full of application developers, short of shouting ‘fire’ and setting off a smoke-bomb? The answer, of course, is to stand up in front of them and announce that you are giving a talk about database access-control and security. ...(more)

Blogs : Software Development

Managing migrations with RedGate SQL Source Control 5 - This is a good day for me. I’ve finally tried the improved migrations feature in the latest version of RedGate SQL Source Control and I’ve tested the feature against all my typical cases so that I can share my findings with you. What is the migrations ......(more)

Blogs : SQL Server 2016

Books Online for SQL Server 2016 - This one is for those of you who prefer to use a local SQL Server Documentation, a.k.a. Books Online (BOL), instead of using the web-based BOL. A local BOL is essential for me. Navigating the contents, switching between pages and searching is lightyears ......(more)

SQL Server 2016 Upgrade Planning - Congratulations! You finally received approval to upgrade to SQL Server 2016. Now the upgrade planning begins. As a follow on to the webinar last week, here are a few resources, tips and an example upgrade planning template to give you a running start. read ......(more)

Blogs : T-SQL

SQL SERVER – Error Fix: Msg 13601 Working with JSON Structure - As you new versions of SQL Server come, the amount of capabilities just increases exponentially. It is tough to keep up in pace with the innovations and learning that one needs to go through. I have in the past written few articles around working with ......(more)

Does my database have data type drift? - Over the years I have come to see that every database has what I call data type drift. Simply put, data type drift is when you have columns with the same name but different data types or length. I’d say about 97% of databases I’ve reviewed have some ......(more)

Temporal Tables: SQL Server 2016’s Time Machine - One of the most interesting new features that Microsoft added to SQL Server 2016 is temporal tables. Temporal tables originated as a part of the ISO/ANSI SQL:2011 standard. You can think of temporal tables as SQL Server’s time machine. read more ...(more)