The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News

Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge

Most data professionals are understandably cautious with the data in their care, but what about with the data they generate? This article about the “creepy” implications of email monitoring caught my eye, as this is one of the things I am responsible for in my job. For those who don’t know, marketing emails often track data about users that’s captured by an image server when the email is downloaded – the server logs when the image was downloaded, by what system, and so on. It’s used to track open rates and other metrics. Because we don’t use the information for anything untoward (I would probably be fired if I sent an email saying “Hey, I saw you opened our email at 2.45 on your iPhone”), I never really considered the fact that this is possible – and common – to be especially “creepy”. The author of the article clearly does, in part because the data was thrown into his colleague’s face as a demonstration of the tool an overenthusiastic PR was hawking.

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet has some features that are either incredibly clever and valuable, or skin-tighteningly creepy depending on your viewpoint. For example, the device’s accelerometer is used to measure your speed of travel. It then tells you how far you travelled by various means – between certain speeds are calculated as walking, cycling, and driving. It quickly realises where you work based on where you end up every weekday morning. It will give you traffic warnings based on this – undeniably a useful service, but it means that you are constantly generating location data that someone can use simply by moving. I’m not going to suggest that Google are going to start targeting people who abandon Google+ with their orbital lasers (let’s be honest, they’re going to use it to target advertising), but any organization having a comprehensive data on where you are and when is far from ideal for a lot of people.

It could even be argued that the whole point of selling dedicated hardware is to facilitate tracking – after all, you’re signed into your Google account, probably the same as you are with your desktop machines, and Google get a more comprehensive view of your online behaviour to target with, rather than that inconvenient fracturing when you switch to a device that isn't signed in.

We all know that there’s more data being stored than ever before, and with an increasing focus on Business Intelligence and big data, getting it and processing it is a big issue for companies. But it’s still worth being aware of what we’re giving away, especially when your every step can end up on someone’s server.

Dave Convery 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 : Disaster Recovery

Sandy wounded servers, some grievously, say services firms - Companies that specialize in data recovery are still getting many calls for help from businesses and institutions whose equipment was damaged by the effects of Hurricane Sandy....(more)

Tech News : General Interest

Mechanical Turk and the Limits of Big Data - It’s telling that the most interesting presenter during MIT Technology Review’s EmTech session on big data last week was not really about big data at all. It was about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the experiments it makes possible....(more)

Improving Online Education Technology, One Computer Scientist at a Time - Online education startups are training a new generation of coders to solve their own problems....(more)

Tech News : Security

How to Steal Data from Your Neighbor in the Cloud - A study proves that software hosted in one part of the cloud can spy on software hosted nearby....(more)

UK's Ministry of Defence Breached With Easy SQL Injection - A group of activist hackers calling themselves NullCrew have targeted the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MOD), and used a simple SQL Injection attack to plunder thousands of email addresses and passwords....(more)

Why You Can’t Vote Online - A decade and a half into the Web revolution, we do much of our banking and shopping online. So why can’t we vote over the Internet? The answer is that voting presents specific kinds of very hard problems....(more)

Tech News : The Lighter Side

"I Can Has Cheezburger" can has its own TV show - LOLwork documents the lives of Cheezburger, the Seattle geek team that capitalized on the LOLcats meme....(more)

SQL Server News : Events

What Do You Want from SQL in the City? - Right now we're starting to think about SQL in the City 2013, and Steve would like to get some open-ended feedback here from people on what they'd like to see. Whether you attended a SQL in the City or not, give us your opinion. What do you want from a one day training event?...(more)

Microsoft News : Development

Partitioned Table Framework (PTF) Project has been published on CodePlex - PTF is a set of a set of T-SQL stored procedures for managing partitioned tables in SQL Server. These procedures may be used in your SQL Agent Jobs or SSIS SQL Tasks that load data into staging tables of your data warehouse and then switch these tables into partitions of your partitioned fact tables....(more)

Microsoft News : Downloads

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 SP1 Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft Office - Microsoft SQL Server 2012 SP1 Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft Office helps you take advantage of SQL Server predictive analytics in Office Excel and Office Visio....(more)

Microsoft News : General Interest

Breakthrough performance with in-memory technologies - At the SQL PASS conference this week, Microsoft unveiled a new in-memory database capability, codenamed “Hekaton1”. Hekaton dramatically improves the throughput and latency of SQL Server’s transaction processing (TP) capabilities....(more)

Microsoft to fold in-memory database technology into SQL Server Next - Hekaton, Microsoft's coming in-memory database engine, will be built into the next version of SQL Server....(more)

Microsoft News : Patches, Bugs

SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 Released - Microsoft has released SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 for general availability. SQL Server 2012 SP1 includes all of the fixes from SQL Server 2012 RTM CU1 and CU2, but not the fixes from CU3 and CU4....(more)

Blogs : Analysis Services / BI

OLAP Sprint - I've got no experience with OLAP, but am diving in this week, and am trying to go from zero to cube prototype in 7 days - an OLAP sprint. Simon Doubt is trying to get from no experience with OLAP to a cube prototype in 7 days - you can see how he's getting on here....(more)

Blogs : Backup and Recovery

Sandy’s Lessons About Disaster Recovery - Were you ready for Sandy? Sure it was downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm, but it still had a devastating effect. For those of use who manage data centers, that impact had many layers....(more)

Weathering the Storm - Businesses in Superstorm Sandy's strike zone are under scrutiny for their disaster recovery plans. How could they have better analyzed to ensure preparedness?...(more)

Blogs : Career

IT jobs on the other side of the cloud - As companies turn increasingly toward the cloud, corporate IT staffers wonder if the grass is greener working for a service provider....(more)

2013 IT salaries: 15 titles getting the biggest pay raises - Certain IT titles will be getting sizable salary hikes, according to data from recruiting and staffing specialist Robert Half Technology....(more)

Blogs : Computing in the Cloud

Microsoft's Cloud Services Mix Leaves Many Vendors in the Dust - IBM became 'Big Blue' because it leased hardware and provided free software, but its collapse divorced the two. The growth of the cloud has caused another marriage, one that brings together software and services. Vendors such as Amazon, Google and especially Microsoft understand this, and they are bound to leave those trying to sell a 'cloud solution' in their dust....(more)

The cloud as data-center extension - Many large enterprises gravitate to the cloud as an escape hatch for overworked and out-of-room data centers -- and then come to love it....(more)

High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud - Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)....(more)

Blogs : Database Design, Theory and Development

Precision in Date/Time Data Types - There is a general misconception, that is common across many different programming/scripting languages, regarding Date/Time data types, their precision, and how this differs in theory versus practice. For the sake of this article, I will be discussing the following data types: DATETIME in T-SQL, DATETIME2(7) in T-SQL, and DateTime in C#.NET....(more)

Blogs : Hardware

Restarting and Shutting Down a Windows 2012 Server - This is a short post to show how you go about shutting down or restarting a Windows 2012 server, which might not be obvious on first glance....(more)

Solid State Storage: Enterprise State Of Affairs - It's been a crazy last few years in the flash storage space. Things really started taking off around 2006 when NAND flash and Moore's law got together. in 2010 it was clear that flash storage was going to be a major part of your storage makeup in the future. It may not be NAND flash specifically though. It will be some kind of memory and not spinning disks....(more)

Blogs : Performance and Tuning

What caused that plan to go horribly wrong - should you update statistics? - Imagine this scenario: You have a stored procedure that runs well most of the time but sometimes it's way off. It's almost as though the performance of it went from great to horrible in a split second. You don't know why but someone says - it's got to be the statistics. But, maybe it's not......(more)

Triggers On Views? What For? - Michael J Swart: "I’m sharing something that I learned this week. I learned that not only are triggers allowed on views but INSTEAD-OF triggers will work on any kind of view, updatable or not."...(more)

Blogs : Professional Development

“It’s only test code…” - “Let me hack this in, it’s only test code”, “Don’t worry about getting it reviewed, it’s only test code”, “It doesn’t have to be elegant or efficient, it’s only test code”… do these phrases sound familiar? Chances are if you’ve working with test automation, at one point or other you will have heard these phrases, you have probably even used them yourself....(more)

Articles : Development

Database Deployment Cribsheet - As part of the long-running Simple-Talk Cribsheet series, William Brewer has written a guide to deployment that described in general terms what is involved in the deployment of a database application, and the sort of issues that one is likely to come up against. ...(more)