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Question of the Day

Data Analytics Classification III

The Voice of the DBA

Daily Coping Tip

Focus on what makes you and others happy today.

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.

The Level of Security These Days

Passwords aren't going anywhere. While I would have thought there would be more advances by this time, and there are, the basic password is still required in many places, especially for resetting an account. Even those MFA places where I can click a notification or enter a code, I still sometimes need a password.

That's fine, and I think MFA is a good solution, but it doesn't alleviate the need to have a strong password. Troy Hunt has written about this topic because we as a collective do a poor job of building passwords. Especially with regards to length. Some of that is poor app (and database) design where we unnecessarily limit password length. However, some of the issues are our fault, as we continue as a group to use poor habits and practices.

There are many guidelines to use with passwords, one of which is the length. The length you should use keeps increasing because hardware power keeps growing. Because of new attacks and techniques, we ought to review what we think is strong on a periodic basis. My password manager defaulted to 8 characters when I started using it over 20 years ago. Since then I've increased that to 12, and now 15. I ask for mixed upper case, lower, and numbers, along with symbols. These are so random that every time I need to give one to my wife to enter in, she's annoyed with the length and mix of keys that need to be pressed.

I haven't seen the brute force table from Hive Systems before, but I like the visual. It helps you determine how strong your password is with modern hardware. This is a similar graphic to the one I used in an encryption talk years ago, where it showed how much it would cost to rent compute power on AWS to brute force crack various algorithms. In case you were wondering, about 5 years ago you could crack a 512bit key on AWS for less than US$75.

I like the graphic, and it shows that my 15 character passwords should be safe for years. This Friday, I'm wondering if you're comfortable with your password lengths? Are they crack-able in less than a year? Take a look at the graphic and let us know.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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arindamxs from SQLServerCentral

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Why you don’t just buy tools to make DevOps happen

Additional Articles from Redgate

Matt Gordan is next in the hot seat. We discuss how Matt keeps the lights on while overseeing many data related projects and how his team know the more they are plugged into projects, the better support the can offer.

The problem with averages

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Everyone learns to calculate an average in school, but, as Joe Celko shows, there are better ways to summarize data.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - An Amazing Live SQL Bits in 2022

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from The Voice of the DBA

I was lucky to travel to London last week and attend SQL Bits 2022. This was the first live SQL Bits I’ve been to in 4 or 5 years,...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Space Invaders on Kubernetes

dbafromthecold@gmail.com from The DBA Who Came In From The Cold

A while ago I blogged about an awesome Chaos Engineering tools built by Eugenio Marzo (t) call KubeInvaders. Since then Eugenio has updated the repo to make it easier...

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Data Analytics Classification III
I am asked to build reports that will help a business analyst determine what factors to change in order to increase revenue by a factor of 2. What type of data analysis is being performed for this task?
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)

The Greatest of All

What does this code return in an Azure SQL Database?

SELECT so.OrderTotal - GREATEST( so.discount1, so.discount2, so.discount3)
 FROM SalesOrder so

Answer: The cost of an order after the largest discount is applied

Explanation: This returns the cost of each order minus the largest of the three discount values is subtracted from it. The GREATEST() function returns the largest of the arguments passed in to it. Ref: Greatest - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/logical-functions-greatest-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 2016 - Development and T-SQL

Bulk Insert Truncation and Try Catch - I ran into an issue where using bulk insert to load a text file with a field having a length greater than the length specified in the table will not be picked up as an error using try...catch. Here is an example of what I mean. The text file is attached and is tab delimited […]

Concatenate two rows into one row being returned - I have a temp table that returns the following: Month Year 09 2021 12 2021 And, I was the following returned: 09-12-2021. Is this possible?

Development - SQL Server 2014

Export csv file with Headers having double quotes but not all data row. - I am trying to export a csv file where the header column are all double quote delimited but only the string data has double quotes. Im not sure SSIS can do this. Any ideas? e.g. "A String","B String","C Number" "abc","def",1 "bob","builder",4

SQL Server 2019 - Development

can not get cursor to work for me - use Joedata go DECLARE @CursorID INT; DECLARE @ViewSite varchar(12); DECLARE CUR_Loop CURSOR FAST_FORWARD FOR SELECT distinct IndexSite ,[IndexWeekOf] ,[IndexMonth] -- ,[IndexSite] ,[IndexDepartment] ,[IndexSpecialty] ,[IndexSkillNumber] ,[IndexSkillset] ,[id] ,[CalcCallsOffered] ,[CalcAdjOffered] ,[CalcAdjAban] ,[CalcAbanPercent] ,[CalcASA] ,[CalcTalk] ,[CalcHold] ,[CalcACW] ,[CalcAHT] ,[CalcOccupancy] ,[WaitTime] ,[AverageAbandonTime] ,[CalcPercentAns] ,[CalcAdjPercentAns] FROM [Joedata].[dbo].[tblUSHC_SkillDailyCalc] ORDER BY ID; OPEN CUR_Loop FETCH NEXT FROM CUR_Loop INTO @CursorID WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS […]

GETDATE - number of dates - a column / division in SQL - I need to do such a calculation. (Get today's date - 219 - HISTSTARTDATE) / 7 AS 'Weeks Of History' When I do it like this (DATEDIFF(DAY,0,GETDATE()) - DATEADD(DAY, -219, GETDATE()) - HISTSTART) / 7 AS 'Weeks Of History' I am getting an error which says 'The data types datetime and date are incompatible […]

Need a Query to output data in a specific format - We have a data set from SQL. We need to move the "Team" values for all matching ObjectIDs into one row. I have an image of what is needed, Fig.1 If possible, we need to have the output formatted as the "DesiredOutput" section in the Fig.1. The query that we have now is: SELECT Personnel.ObjectID […]

SQL Select date - Hi all , I have fiscal year date is from Oct 1 to Sept 31 every year. I would like to have a SQL select statement to load 2 fiscal years of history + current fiscal year. For example, if i run now it will return all records with date Oct 1 2019 -present fiscal […]

Using OPENJSON to extract child subgroups from JSON file & link them to parent - Hi there I have a sample JSON file,.. from which I am attempting to extract data from using OPENJSON in SQL. Now the file is broken down in the 3 main sections: 1) Return 2) Customer 3) Address Now I am able to extract the Return and Item information . However Ive got 2 issues: […]

SQL Azure - Administration

Backing up an Azure SQL Database hosted on Azure VM onto an Azure File Share. - Team, Can we create a credential using SAS Key for an Azure File Share with extension .file.core.windows.net and Backup an Azure SQL Database onto it; Right Now i receive the Error "Error while decoding the storage key." With Thanks, Satnam

Reporting Services

Unable to hide the text box - Hello all I am writing the following condition to hide the textbox based on a condition but some how it is not working I am able to set the value =IIF(FormatDateTime(Parameters!LiveDt.Value,2) < FormatDateTime(Parameters!visitdt.Value,2), "True", "False") =FormatDateTime(Parameters!LiveDt.Value,2) < FormatDateTime(Parameters!visitdt.Value,2) I am able to see the text correctly based on condition but unable to hide it

Using a Stored Procedure in SSRS Report Builder - I have a SQL Stored Procedure that works great for one of our applications we use for cost reporting. I want to try and use the same SQL Stored Procedure in an SSRS report. I am able to copy the the Stored Procedure into Report Builder with no issues, but I can never get any […]

Powershell

get file name during loop and insert into Table - I'm running this script to loop thru tables and insert the timestamp and wirespeed based upon latest updated record in table. I would like to add another field to table bc_staging called equipid and grab the file name during the loop. I can see the value in the statement write-host "Processing" $Row.name that I want […]

Integration Services

How to read URL which has PDF format in SSIS - I Have a URL when we browse on the UI it open the PDF file. Here is the sample URL- https://abciruat.net:1223/ASDFLink/VisualServerget&pVersion=0046&VisualRep=D1&docId=737474784&VisId=data&accesMode=r&authId=SD%12%33%4565%556%84WebAS%20O%%20C%3DDE&expiration=20210908165305&secKey=MIIBUgZI When we browse the above sample URL it opens content in PDF format. My requirement is how can i use this URL in SSIS using script task and download the PDF from this […]

The Future of Community

Voting for Sessions on GroupBy.Org starts today!!!! Please vote!!! - Please help that SQL Server centric community and vote for your favorite sessions that you'd like to see during the even. There's a link at the top of the pages (on for the Americas and one for Europe) that has more details. Here's the link https://www.groupby.org/vote-now/ Once you're done voting for your favorites, vote for […]

T-SQL (SS2K5)

Cannot resolve the collation conflict - Hello! Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS" and "Latin1_General_BIN" in the equal to operation I have two tables - Table1 as linuxdata ( only one column and that is UID - nvarchar(50) Table2 as coumputerdata (columns: id (uniqueidentifier) , name(nvarchar(63), importid(nvarchar(80) .. and so on) UID of table1 and importdid of table2 has […]

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