The Blame Game
Equifax is blaming a single IT person for their data breach. Steve Jones worries this is a sign of things to come.
Statistics in SQL: Student’s t-test
Many undergraduates have misunderstood the name 'Students' in the t-test to imply that it was designed as a simple test suitable for students. In fact it was William Sealy Gosset, an Englishman publishing under the pseudonym Student, who developed the t-test and t distribution in 1908, as a way of making confident predictions from small sample sizes of normally-distributed variables. As Gosset's employer was Guinness, the brewer, Phil Factor takes a sober view of calculating it in SQL.
Network Configuration of SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in Azure
Implementing SQL Server Failover Clustering in Azure virtual machines differs in several aspects from its on-premises implementations. These differences reflect some of the unique characteristics of the storage and network infrastructure services in the Microsoft cloud environment. In this article, Marcin Policht looks at the networking aspects of clustered deployments of SQL Server 2016 in Azure.
Citizen Scientists
More and more people are becoming citizen scientists, even in companies. Steve Jones thinks this is helpful, but we still need professionals.
Automated Database Provisioning for Development and Testing
If your development team needs to work on anonymised copies of the current production database, and if changes are being delivered rapidly as well, that could mean a lot of time and routine DevOps work copying databases. SQL Clone was designed for tasks like this. Grant Fritchey investigates whether you save time, effort and scripting over the more traditional approach, and at what point it makes sense to use it.
The Achilles Heel
In a long career in IT, Phil Factor cannot recall a 'major incident', where the failure or breach was due to a single 'Achilles Heel', or even a single team of people. They are always due to a whole plethora of slack and ignorant practices.
Indexing for Windowing Functions: WHERE vs. OVER
Erik Darling shows that if you take SQL Server's word when it asks for an index, things can go horribly awry.
8 Ways to Export SQL Results To a Text File
This tip will show eight ways to export the results of a query to a text file.
Blogs
JSON_OBJECTAGG is an Aggregate: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I wrote an article recently on the JSON_OBJECTAGG function, but neglected to include an...
Cultural Change: Fostering a Cost-Aware Culture in Your Organisation
By HeyMo0sh
After working deep in cloud operations, I’ve learned that FinOps isn’t really about dashboards...
Beyond VARBINARY: How to Store PDFs in SQL Server Using FILESTREAM and FileTable
By gbargsley
Hello, dear blog reader. Today’s post is coming to you straight from the home...
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Designing Database Changes Before Deployment: Level 1 of the Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments
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Question of the Day
Creating a JSON Document I
I want to create a JSON document that contains data from this table:
TeamID TeamName City YearEstablished 1 Cowboys Dallas 1960 2 Eagles Philadelphia 1933If I run this code, what is returned?
SELECT json_objectagg('Team' : TeamName)
FROM dbo.NFLTeams;
See possible answers