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Daily Coping Tip

Reset yourself for the month ahead with a goal for the next 30 days

I also have a thread at SQLServerCentral dealing with coping mechanisms and resources. Feel free to participate.

For many of you out there working in a new way, I'm including a thought of the day on how to cope in this challenging time from The Action for Happiness Coping Calendar. My items will be on my blog, feel free to share yours.

Confidential VMs

Ever since we started to offload workloads to hardware that we didn't physically control, there have been security concerns. I remember when this started with application service providers and web workloads. This has continued to be an issue as more and more types of workloads have moved to cloud vendors and other hosting providers.

Google is trying to ameliorate some of the concerns by offering customers confidential VMs. These are special types of VMs, using encryption and hardware capabilities to protect the workloads from any unauthorized access.

I don't know to what extent this practically protects a workload compared to a non-confidential VM. I'm sure there is some extra protection, but the weak point in most cases here is still likely the humans that use credentials to access the VM. I'd suspect a determined attacker would try to hack the sysadmin rather than the VM itself.

In any case, Google is trying to ensure the added encryption doesn't cause and workload degradation. Hardware can likely help her, but I'm not sure that you can perform encryption and decryption without using more resources. There might be minimal impact, but there has to be some resource impact.

I'm glad there is research and work still happening to find ways to improve security for systems that we might no longer control. I think that's increasingly the trend. Whether you go with a cloud vendor like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. or you look to host with a Rackspace like provider, more and more of our infrastructure is being outsourced, and I don't know that the trend will reverse itself anytime soon. Even if it does, I think the more we can provide security hurdles against unauthorized access, the better.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

 
 Featured Contents

Change the Instance Collation by Rebuilding Databases in SQL Server 2017

iLearnSQL from SQLServerCentral

As a part of my DBA activities, I do a lot of SQL Server installations every week. Most of the time, I install the instance with the default collation. A collation is a configuration setting in SQL Server that determines how the database engine should read the data. SQL Server has huge list of collations […]

How Many Databases Can You Name?

Additional Articles from Database Journal

There is a huge number of databases available. How many could you name? Create our list and then compare to our list of well over 100 databases!

What specific deployment data is valuable to you or your organization?

Additional Articles from Redgate

Redgate have assembled a small development team to research and build a capability that not only records your deployments over time, but provides a window into past trends and insights. To achieve the best results we need to understand from you what deployment value should be recorded and displayed. Please help us by completing our short two-page survey.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Moving 1/3 of a heap

Bert Wagner from Bert Wagner

Watch this week’s video on YouTube. A Giant Heap Recently I had to filter out 1.2 billion records from a 3.5 billion row heap. Don’t ask me why this...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Business Continuity in SQL Database

James Serra from James Serra's Blog

I have wrote a number of blogs on the topic of business continuity in SQL Database before (HA/DR for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Database high availability, Azure SQL...

 

 Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

 

Offline Files

I have multiple files in a filegroup in my database.  There are two filegroup: Primary and Archive. The FGARchive file is located in the Archive filegroup. I decide to run this code:
ALTER DATABASE FGTest MODIFY FILE (NAME = N'FGArchive1', OFFLINE)
GO
What happens?

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

 

 

 Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Querying Data Sources from a BDC

What SQL Server technology is in use by Big Data Clusters (BDC) to query external data?

Answer: Polybase

Explanation: The Polybase technology in SQL Server is used to query external data sources in BDC. Ref: What are Big Data Clusters? - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/big-data-cluster/big-data-cluster-overview?view=sql-server-ver15

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 2016 - Administration
ExecuteScalar: CommandText property has not been initialized - One ASP.NET project keeps on receiving a message below from "Try...Catch...End try" block. System.InvalidOperationException: ExecuteScalar: CommandText property has not been initialized I searched Google but can't get help. Is this SQL script mistake? Please help. --------------------------------------------------------- It points at a function from app below dim iCount as Int32 = 0 dim SQL as string = […]
How to stop database restore that survived reboot showing progress in error log - SQL Server 2016 SP CU7 on Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard.  Backstory: Agent job runs daily that performs restore of database in about 30 minutes (360G MDF).  All of a sudden one day restore still running hours later.  Waited it out.  Ran in 18 hours then several hours later early morning restore ran as normal.  […]
using Powershell scripts to do SQL backups - Hello, hopefully this can be a straight forward question, but at the same time, looking to get some advice and if possible experience from someone that tried this... but as the title says, My company has large databases, about 1.5 tb, and dont want to invest in software, but of course we do have good […]
Monitoring CDC - Hi All I've noticed our CDC capture job causing blocking for hours on end at a time. Digging around, I've found the latency using this script to reach 1775 SELECT latency FROM sys.dm_cdc_log_scan_sessions WHERE session_id = 0   I'm hoping that someone can assist me with really figuring out how far behind it actually is. […]
SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL
Nested FOR XML Problem - I have the following data and I want to generate XML where the transactions are nested under the position for the relevant asset. CREATE TABLE #temptable ( [bp_sym] varchar(50), [person_key] varchar(100), [bargain_date] date, [disp_acqu_text] varchar(9), [quantity] decimal(12,2), [cumulative_qty] decimal(12,2), [book_cost_change] decimal(12,2), [cumulative_book_cost] decimal(12,2), [swim_refs] varchar(6), [security_code] char(7), [asset_name] nvarchar(4000) ) INSERT INTO #temptable ([bp_sym], [person_key], […]
SQL 2012 - General
Run same query on multiple servers with sqlcmd and save the output - Hello, I have this 3 lines: sqlcmd -S "Server1" -d -U -P -i query.sql -o result.txt sqlcmd -S "Server2" -d -U -P -i query.sql >> result.txt sqlcmd -S "Server3" -d -U -P -i query.sql >> result.txt If I copy and paste this code to a cmd […]
When run query for only part it take too much time so How to solve this issue ? - I work on sql server 2012 query I face issue : when run query return 10 rows for only one part it take 50 second I try to run it in another time may be pc have more load but it take same time 50 second to return 10 rows for only one part . […]
SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL
Split dates based on Start and End Dates - Hi Team, I'm seeking help on date split, the dates can start between month also. below is the sample code and output. Thank you!   Create Table #DATE_SPLIT ( ID INT, StartDate DATE, EndDate DATE ) INSERT INTO #DATE_SPLIT SELECT 10,'01/10/2020','03/21/2020' UNION ALL SELECT 10,'03/22/2020','12/31/9999' --OUTPUT ID StartDate EndDate 10 '01/10/2020' '01/31/2020' 10 '02/01/2020' '02/29/2020' […]
SQL Server 2019 - Administration
File Paths in sysfiles on Replica Database - Morning Guys, How can I get the correct file path from sysfiles (or anywhere in the database with t-sql) when the db is the read only replica. It appears that sysfiles shows the location of the files on the principle database not on the replica. In this case the are in different locations.   Cheers […]
SQL Server 2019 - Development
create view out of dynamic query from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS - Hi, Is there a way to create a view out if this query below? DECLARE @query nvarchar(max) SELECT @query = STUFF( ( SELECT ' UNION ALL SELECT ''' + TABLE_SCHEMA + ''' AS SCHEMANAME, ' + '''' + TABLE_NAME + ''' AS TABLENAME, ' + 'LEFT(''' + TABLE_NAME + ''', 3) AS SYSTEM, ' + […]
Get multiple values out of xml - Hi I have the following Syntax:   DECLARE @MyXMLString XML SET @MyXMLString = ' Woonkamer + Eetkamer Woonkamer 1 1 11.3 3.86 43.62 2.5 109.05 Zuluft 151 0 1 1 Keuken Open keuken 6 1 3.82 2.42 9.24 2.5 23.1 […]
Reporting Services 2005 Development
Average in a Matrix - Hello I'm using the Matrix Wizard and everything is working right except one total that I modified.  See image: The detail columns total at the bottom and along the row without any problem. But in my last column 'Avg FTE' I'm trying to get an average. The average works across the row, but not at […]
General
Looking for custom T-SQL - I've inventoried all our SQL Servers, Service Accts, etc in a home-grown Inventory DB. Simplified here, my Tables\Cols\Data include: TABLE=ServerName w/ Cols: ServerName, Active TABLE=ServiceAccts w/ Cols: ServerName, SvcAcct, Service ServerName Active SvcAcct Service ========== ====== ======= ======= Server123 N SvcAcct123 SQL Service ServerABC N SvcAcctABC <--- SQL Service ServerABC N SvcAcctABC <--- SQL Agent […]
SSDT
SSIS Expression help - Hi Guys,/ Is anyone can help me convert this SQL to SSIS Expression? SELECT DATEADD(DAY,DATEDIFF(DAY,0,CONVERT(DATE,DATEADD(WK,DATEDIFF(WK,0,GETDATE()),0) - 8)), '00:00:00') Thanks in Advance.  
Design Ideas and Questions
Columnstore Index and Nonclustered Index on Table - We have a table definition below with a columnstore index and nonclustered row indices. The data in this table increases 10K per day and in a year can have 400K ColNumber with each having 1 to many ColProperty. This table will be used mostly for reads/reference and hardly have updates. Would it be beneficial to […]
 

 

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