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

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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.

Stairway to SQL Server Agent - Level 2: Job Steps and Subsystems

by Richard Waymire

SQLServerCentral.com

SQL Server Agent jobs are made up of a series of one or more Job Steps. A job step is assigned to a specific job subsystem, which identifies the kind of work the job step is going to perform. Each job step runs in a separate security context, although each job also has an owner that determines who can modify the job.

Time is Precious

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

Time might be the most precious commodity that Steve Jones has in managing life.

Network Configuration of SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in Azure

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SQLServerCentral

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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

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

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

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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.

Don't Use Code Coverage

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

Code Coverage is a metric that Steve Jones sees often misused.

The Achilles Heel

by Phil Factor

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

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.