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Featured Contents

Question of the Day

The Strict Replace

The Voice of the DBA

Daily Coping Tip

Learn something new and share it with others

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.

Microsoft Fights Back

A number of US government organizations were hacked recently, with a vulnerability in some SolarWinds management software. This was through source code backdoors slipped into updates. I wrote about it recently, with the thought that our OSes need ways to that we can monitor them with less privileges.

This was through Windows servers that were managed, which allowed Microsoft to fight back. This was a high profile attack, and Microsoft responded, unleashing a Death Star according to this article. The efforts by Microsoft show their willingness and ability to quickly work against malware, which I'm sure many appreciate.

The ability to easily change the way that software works is critical for many of us. We often use data to drive the behavior of systems, but more organizations building software are starting to ensure that they can easily manipulate how software works with feature flags or toggles. While I see plenty of customers using this, I see more not bothering to adapt their software to add them. Maybe more important, I see lots of customers not using these flags to help with deployments, especially database deployments.

I'm more of a fan of deploying the database first, but whether you deploy the database first or last, having toggles in your software that control how database changes affect your system is important. With a toggle, I can deploy database changes without the application behavior being altered. If I suspect issues, or find them with a few testers, I can roll back the database change without the application being broken for everyone.

Changing behavior on the fly, especially when you need to verify database changes, is an important tool to have at your disposal. I suspect before Microsoft made a few changes to their software, they made the change behind a feature flag that someone tested. That might be something you want to think about doing.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

Featured Contents

Working with NULL Values in an ADF Data Flow?

diponkar.paul from SQLServerCentral

Learn how to replace NULL values in an ADF data flow.

Getting your SQL Server Development Data in Three Easy Steps

Additional Articles from Redgate

Phil Factor takes a staged approach to generating development data, creating one project that simply copies data from an existing database, another that copies most data but generates any personal or sensitive data, and a third that starts from 'anonymized' data and then generates other columns entirely and increase the number of rows for testing.

Dynamic Power BI Slicer Using DAX Logic

Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com

Learn how to create dynamic data slicers in Power BI with this step by step example to show how this can be done.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Using Amazon FSx for SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances – What You Need to Know!

david.bermingham from Clustering for Mere Mortals

Intro If you are considering deploying your own Microsoft SQL Server instances in AWS EC2 you have some decisions to make regarding the resiliency of the solution. Sure, AWS...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - T-SQL script to find hierarchy of tables – Row-wise result

Brahmanand Shukla from SQL Server Carpenter

As I promised in my previous post T-SQL script to find hierarchy of tables – Columnar result – SQL Server Carpenter, here is another version of the query to...

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	The Strict Replace
What is returned from this code? SELECT REPLACE('I do not want a chair' COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN, 'Chair', 'desk' ); GO
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)

Running R Scripts in SQL Server

What stored procedure is used to run R scripts in SQL Server 2019?

Answer: sp_execute_external_script

Explanation: You use sp_execute_external_script to run R, Python, or Java code. Ref: sp_execute_external_script - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/system-stored-procedures/sp-execute-external-script-transact-sql?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 2017 - Administration

SQL Service "services" recovery option - Good day all. Quick question. Has anyone, under Services > Recovery for SQL Server, set the following and does anyone have any issues or recommendations. I personally have never set this for SQL Service (or any service) and am wondering if any issues.

Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition license expired error - Hello experts, I've run into an issue that many others on the internet seem to report: Although it is free, VS 2017 Community Edition starts presenting a license expired error after 30 days. The main workaround has been to sign into a Microsoft account. However, that workaround doesn't work for computers that are not allowed […]

824 errors - Hi All, Today we are seeing 824 errors on one of the database. When I ran checkdb I am seeing below errors. Note: The database hosted on a 3rd part storage appliance called Actifio. Use master Go DBCC CHECKDB (CDP) WITH ALL_ERRORMSGS, NO_INFOMSGS; GO Msg 1823, Level 16, State 6, Line 3A database snapshot cannot […]

Continuous replication from SQL Server to Google's BigQuery - Hello everyone, I have a need for enabling a continuous flow of data from a SQL Server production server to the Google's BigQuery. There are a lot of commercial tools for such purpose and most of them use CDC-based methods for propagating changes, examples: Striim (https://www.striim.com/striim-for-google-bigquery/) StitchData (https://www.stitchdata.com/integrations/sql-server/google-bigquery/) Has anyone had a proven experience that […]

SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

Update table - DECLARE @Name varchar(80) DECLARE @InsuranceReminderDate datetime DECLARE @body varchar(150) DECLARE @Email varchar(100) DECLARE Messaging CURSOR LOCAL FAST_FORWARD READ_ONLY FOR SELECT distinct C.Name,I.InsuranceReminderDate,C.Email from [dbo].[Customer] C inner join [dbo].[Insurance] I on C.ID=I.ID where convert(date,[I.InsuranceReminderDate]) = CONVERT(date, getdate()) I.MsgSent<>1 OPEN Messaging; WHILE 1=1 BEGIN FETCH NEXT FROM Messaging INTO @Name,@InsuranceReminderDate,@Email; IF @@FETCH_STATUS = -1 BREAK; SET @body […]

How to filter out the data? - Hello All, Need your help to filter out the data, please. I couldn't find a better term to describe, but hope the example below will instantly clarify what I need: 1. There is a range of simple physical barcodes, applied on imported products - I am sure you have seen many examples in supermarkets around […]

Populate Several fields of new record with values from previous record - Hello Everyone - I am a newbie to SQL scripting so please don't take anything for granted regarding my knowledge of SQL, bearing in mind that I have had very limited exposure to it. That been said let me explain my challenge as best I can. I am developing an application using a RAD tool […]

real time logging in production enviornment - Hi, What is the best way to do real time logging of SQL server in production environment without affecting the performance of the same. Logging of events like cause of Time Out errors or state of the sql server after the command to exec a stp was called and before that stp was started to […]

Administration - SQL Server 2014

SQLServer won't start? - Hi Not sure what happened, but hoping someone can point me in the right direction. sqlserver won't start, the event log has this error Faulting application name: sqlservr.exe, version: 2014.120.4100.1, time stamp: 0x5535c7e7 Faulting module name: MSVCP100.dll, version: 6.3.9600.19678, time stamp: 0x5e82c88a Exception code: 0xc0000135 Fault offset: 0x00000000000ecf40 Faulting process id: 0x19ec Faulting application start […]

Development - SQL Server 2014

exclude Always On Read-only databases - Hello, I am writing a tsql statement but every time i run it, it comes up with error: The target database ('Database_Name') is in an availability group and is currently accessible for connections when the application intent is set to read only. So i am trying to find a way to exclude Always On Read-Only […]

SQL Server 2019 - Administration

SQL Server 2019 Upgrade Advisor - Hey guys, in the past there used to be an upgrade advisor for SQL Server 2016, which would do a code check, and see if anything is not compatible with the new version. Is there such a thing for SQL 2019, I can't seem to find it.

SQL Server 2019 - Development

Import last CSV file to SQL Server by date (date inside the file) - I have a folder with some files whose contents I need to import to a table in SQL Server. Among those files I need to choose the lastest generated so I can import it to the database. My problem is that the date and hour I need to consider to select the lastest file […]

Calculate the Difference of two Weeek numbers - Hi ,I have Week_Number and Year_Week as below ,I need to get a value of 2 every time when i subtract the 2 week number columns . Thank you in advance for the help ;WITH CTE AS ( SELECT 49 AS A1, '202049' AS A2 , 51 AS B1, '202051' AS B2 UNION ALL SELECT […]

Powershell

Using powershell to strip RTF tags and return text. - Hi, We've been looking to pull the text from a table in a vendor DB that stores in RTF format. I found a solution on a site but am having trouble getting it to work. It seems to work ok if I pass a result straight to it but if I try and use SQL […]

Analysis Services

Dimension key problem - Hi, I need to modify an existing dimension that calculates that how late (how many days) shipments are. What the actual shipments (like IDs or weights or whatever) are completely irrelevant in this context. It is late by X days (zero or less than zero = not late) and that's it. I have the expected […]

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