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Database Weekly
The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News
Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge
Editorial
 

The Ultimate Home Office

When the pandemic hit, we were fairly well prepared at Redgate. We've had lots of experience connecting offices, we have an amazing IT staff that has built a great VPN setup, lots of SSO authentication, and a tremendous KB of info.

However, many of our staff didn't have a dedicated space in their residence. Even those that did often had to share with partners, children, and others. That was a challenge. I know because we created a Slack channel for people to share their work space pictures. I saw some creative solutions, and I also sympathized with way some people have had to work during the last few months.

I'm lucky that I've been working from home a long time and have made some changes over the years to build a better home office. I've upgraded PCs, added some lights, gotten a standing desk, etc. in that time. The pandemic got me to finally upgrade to a Secret Lab chair and adding a ring light for video calls. I also rearranged the office slightly after refinishing our floors.

After seeing Troy Hunt's post this week on his ultimate home office, I'm a little jealous. Not that I want to spend that much time and money on my office, or do all the IoT and other configuration, I am still interested as a geek in what he did. It's quite a write-up, and if you go through it, those of you that are hardware geeks will probably enjoy it and then frown at your setup. You might also get jealous if you read about some of the systems Glenn Berry has built, Brent Ozar's home office, or even the studio that Adam Saxton has built.

For now, I'm pretty happy with my home office, though I still have a few minor things to work on. A little more cable management, perhaps a few small storage boxes/places for my desk, and certainly a little sweeping and mopping. That last one is something that needs to be done on a more regular basis, at least while the pandemic is stuff affecting me.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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The Weekly News
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.
Vendors/3rd Party Products

Creating a Simple Development Harness with SQL Compare and SQL Data Generator

There is no single, correct approach to developing and testing your SQL batches and routines. It depends on the requirement. For simple tasks, like modifying and testing a view or stored procedure, SQL Compare and SQL Data Generator, combined, provide a useful, lightweight development harness.

Exploring the SQL Compare Options

Phil Factor dissects and disentangles the various SQL Compare options.

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

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.

AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services

OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless

“Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media...

Administration

Hands-On with Columnstore Indexes: Part 3 Maintenance and Additional Options

In the final article of this series, Edward Pollack demonstrates the maintenance of columnstore indexes. He also takes a look at nonclustered columnstore and memory-optimized columnstore indexes.… The post Hands-On...

New Group Policy Updates for Windows 10 in 2020

The Windows 10 May 2020 Update includes some new Group Policy settings to manage security, delivery optimization, and apps. The post New Group Policy Updates for Windows 10 in 2020...

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps Changing Build Notifications

I don’t do a lot of team builds in Azure DevOps, but I constantly use it for demos. However, I’m often experimenting with things and I break builds regularly.... The...

Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL Database – Advanced Threat Detection

You should always seriously consider enabling this feature. This is part of the ADS suite – Advanced Data Security and I will show you how good this pro-active service... The...

Checking Azure SQL DB service tier via T-SQL

If you have to manage or work with an Azure SQL database and want to know what service tier the database is currently operating, but you don't have access... The...

Career Growth and Certifications

Giving Back to Speakers

It might be hard to think back to 2007, but at tha...

The Ironic DBA—My First Year as a DBA [Part 4]

My Favorite and Recommended Training Resources As I’ve been in intense, focused SQL Server training for the last year, I thought it would be a great time to share... The...

Shaping the future of lifelong learning

I think we can all agree that lifelong learning is the future, for all of us. We know that we need to learn and develop all the time, simply...

Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google, AWS)

Set your Azure VM to auto-shutdown and have it notify you on Slack

Virtual machines cost money when they’re powered on. Most servers obviously need to be on 24 hours a day. Others, like development machines, only have to be on when...

AWS Deployment Pipelines

I’m at the just barely scratching the surface level of getting started with AWS Deployment Pipelines. Of course, the first thing I want to do with them is get... The...

Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars

Embracing DevOps through database migrations with Flyway

Discover the aspects, methods, and strategies to build and manage your database deployments through CI/CD pipelines with open source tools like Flyway. Date and time: Wednesday July 29 & Friday July 31. Can't join us live? register to receive the recording.

Announcing Saturday & Sunday Office Hours.

During the quarantines, I’m doing free training. It looks like we’re going to be stuck inside here for another long while, so for the next couple of months, I’m...

DMO/SMO/Powershell

Using Secret Management module to run SSMS, VS Code and Azure Data Studio as another user

Following on from my last post about the Secret Management module. I was asked another question. > Can I use this to run applications as my admin account? A...

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

How do you make DevOps and automation work in the real world?

We talk a lot about DevOps at Redgate and how you can include the database when you’re automating your pipeline so that you can release faster while keeping your...

DocumentDB/Key-Value/Graph/other NoSQL Databases

Who is afraid of this lovely creature called Gremlin?

Raul Gonzalez Travelling in time is something humans have dreamed of and written many novels and movies about, and today I felt kind of like that - from A Space Odyssey to another 80's classic, Gremlins ??. However, this gremlin is not scary like those you could not feed after midnight or get wet. In fact, the Gremlin that I will talk you about will become your best friend if you need to create a Graph Database in Cosmos DB.

ETL/SSIS/Azure Data Factory/Biml

The What, Why, When, and How of Incremental Loads

When moving data in an extraction, transformation,...

ADF.procfwk v1.8.4 – Database Schema Reorganise and Restructuring

Code Project Overview This open source code project delivers a simple metadata driven processing framework for Azure Data Factory (ADF). The framework is made possible by coupling ADF with...

HA/DR/Always On/Clustering

Key Features for Disaster Recovery-As-A-Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS has steadily become a more popular option to...

Business Continuity in SQL Database

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... The...

Hardware

Launching the #CPUOverload Project: Testing Every x86 Desktop Processor since 2010

One of the most visited parts of the AnandTech website is our benchmark database, Bench. Over the last decade we've placed as much benchmark data as we can in...

Performance Tuning SQL Server

Why You Can’t Always Rely On Missing Index Requests

Greentexting The problem with relying on any data point is that when it’s not there, it can look like there’s nothing to see. Missing indexes requests are one of those data...

PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI

NEW way to create measures in Power BI!

There is a NEW way to create measures in Power BI ...

Product Reviews and Articles

Why cataloging data is a sensitive issue

It’s just over two years since the GDPR started being enforced and it’s also the month when many businesses in the US now need to comply with the CCPA....

Product Upgrades and Releases

Transact-SQL: The Building Blocks to SQL Server Programming by Gregory A. Larsen

Transact SQL (TSQL) is the languaged used to query and update data stored in a SQL Server. This book, written by Simple Talk author Greg Larsen, will give developers...

Security News and Issues

On the Twitter Hack

Twitter was hacked this week. Not a few people's Twitter accounts, but all of Twitter. Someone compromised the entire Twitter network, probably by stealing the log-in credentials of one...

T-SQL

Learn to Store and Analyse Documents on Windows File System with SQL Server Semantic Search – Part 1

Total: 1 Average: 5The article examines storing unstructured data using native windows directory structure and managing it through the SQL Server database. Subsequently, we demonstrate how to perform comparative...

IS NULL vs IS NOT NULL

Drop The Verse Why is IS NULL (not to be confused with ISNULL, the function) considered in equality predicate, and IS NOT NULL considered an inequality (or range) predicate? It seems...

Probing Columnstore Indexes

This article was first published on: 2020-03-14. This article will probe the performance benefits of columnstore indexes, on a transactional (OLTP) workload for real-time analytics. We'll cover examples... The...

The Lighter Side

Bugatti’s latest multimillion hypercar trades top speed for fun

Because really, where are you going to find a road straight enough to do 300mph?

Ford’s electric car engineers go crazy with 1,400hp Mustang Mach-E

This one-off EV features seven electric motors and 2,300lbs of downforce.

Wave-particle duality in action—big molecules surf on their own waves

Heavy molecules reveal wave-like properties after scattering from light beam.

SpaceX sets a turnaround record, flying the same rocket in 51 days [Updated]

Every booster still undergoes detailed inspections between launches.

Tools for Development

How to Get Started with SQL Server Management Studio

In the big picture, you need to: Download the free Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and install it, accepting the defaults Connect to your SQL Server Create a low-privileged...

 
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