Encryption Works
Encryption is supposed to protect data, and it appears to be working as police and authorities are often stymied by encrypted disks. Steve Jones recommends you encrypt your disks on all your machines.
TSQL Challenge 71 - Play mangled words game in TSQL
Your task is to process the input table that contains several mangled words and try to 'un-mangle' them and validate them against a 'dictionary' table.
Backup Verification: Tips for Database Backup Testing
A Backup system is merely part of a recovery system. If your backups can't be used to recover the database, then they're useless. Do you regularly make sure that you can restore a database from your backups?
Vote for the DBA in Space Finalists
There are 15 finalists in the DBA in Space competition. Cast your vote today, and every day, for the next 5 days to decide who is going into space.
A brief explanation and solution for the Double Hop problem
What on earth does “Login failed for user ‘(null)’, Reason: Not associated with a trusted SQL Server conn” mean?
The Employment Contract
This Friday Steve Jones wants to know if you'd like to have an employment contract of some sort. Do you want your duties, or maybe exlcusions, explicitly spelled out in an agreement?
How to Build a Resume (that doesn’t suck)
Resumes are like opinions, which are like something else: everybody’s got one. And if you don’t have one, then certain key functions are very hard to perform. In this case, not having a resume makes the job-getting difficult.
Restoring a SQL Server Database – A Practical Example
Performing a Database Restore is a part of a DBA's daily life. A DBA may need to perform a Restore due to various reasons such as recovery, refreshing a database for testing purpose etc. Many times it can be difficult to perform a Restore due to corrupted media, low disk space on the server and so on. This articlel outlines one approach which can be used to Restore the backup of the Production Database a test environment.
Setup Alerts for PBM
PBM raises errors for policy violations. We can create alerts on those errors to be notified of policy violations. In order to setup alerts on these errors there are three prerequisites. Note that violations for the “On Demand” evaluation mode do not raise errors. A policy must be set to
Not So Unbreakable
Oracle touted its database software as unbreakable, but many security researchers think the company is not spending enough effort on security. Steve Jones has a few comments.
Blogs
Prime Day Recommendations
By Steve Jones
It’s Prime Day. A few of my recommendations, since I want to do some...
Fabric for Operational Reporting & SQL Endpoint Trap
With Fabric Mirroring, Microsoft is promoting a nice and appealing story for operational reporting...
Crawl, Walk, Run with Agentic Development of Power BI Assets
If you’ve been watching AI roll through the data community and thinking, “this seems...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
Concurrency and Baseline Control: Level 5 of the Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Concurrency and Baseline Control: Level...
Spending Time in the Office
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Spending Time in the Office
Question of the Day
Multiple Values Inserted
I have this code on SQL Server 2022. What happens when it runs all at once?
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.Commission GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Commission (id INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1) CONSTRAINT CommissionPK PRIMARY KEY , salesperson VARCHAR(20) , commission VARCHAR(20) ) GO INSERT dbo.Commission ( salesperson, commission) VALUES ( 'Brian', 12 ), ( 'Brian', 'None' ) GOSee possible answers