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Featured Contents

Question of the Day

Using Collation in SQL Server

The Voice of the DBA

Daily Coping Tip

Tune into your feelings without judging or trying to change them

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.

My Favorite Data Platform Feature

At SQL Bits a few weeks back there was a community keynote on Friday. Ben Weissman and Rob Sewell put this together as a fun way of involving others. They invited a number of people to each take 5 minutes and talk about their favorite part of the data platform, which encompasses a wide variety of technologies and products. There were a few people who chose Purview, Azure networking, and quite a few ways of using Power BI.

Me? I choose the Create button in Azure. Really, Azure itself because of the amazing array of things that you can deploy in minutes. It's stunning to me to think back to the mid-2000s, when I first saw the Azure platform at TechEd and a Microsoft employee demo'd a key-value table, literally a two-column table. They were trying to sell this as a great way to deploy lookup data to mobile sales applications at scale. I was less than impressed.

This year I deployed a Synapse workspace in less than 10 minutes. Maybe less than 5. I know little about Synapse, and the idea of building a data warehouse and analytics platform, loading data, and running queries isn't something I'd think I could do in 10 minutes, but I did it. I've found containers to be similarly useful in quickly getting something up and running, but even they require Docker or some other software installed and configured. In Azure, I can set things up in minutes.

In the last year I've set up numerable resources, from databases to web apps to a Kubernetes install. All in minutes, which is quicker than I could do something on my local system except for creating databases. If I had prepped things or had more knowledge that might not be the case, but the lack of needing to prep or learn a lot to get something set up is amazing in and of itself. This is especially true when I want to experiment with a technology or a new solution. I can quickly build an array of systems with much less effort than on-premises.

I don't know how many of you use the cloud at work, but I find it amazing. It's one part of the data platform from Microsoft that I really appreciate, especially as I've tried to work with MongoDB, Redis, and other technologies at home. The cloud makes things easier, even with databases.

Today, I'm wondering what your favorite part of the data platform might be. Is it something in SQL Server? Maybe a related technology? Perhaps something else that helps you work with data these days. Let us know what data platform thing is exciting to your career.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

Featured Contents

How do you secure sensitive data in a modern Data Warehouse?

diponkar.paul from SQLServerCentral

In 2019 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news reported a massive data breach at the Desjardins Group, which is a Canadian financial service cooperative and the largest federation of credit unions in North America. The report indicated, a "malicious" employee copied sensitive personal information collected by Desjardins from their data warehouse. The data breach compromised the […]

Data Types in PostgreSQL: Learning PostgreSQL with Grant

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

PostgreSQL has an unusually large number of data types. Grant Fritchey reviews each data type and discusses the good and bad points of each.

Summit 2022 Call for Speakers Closes Soon

Additional Articles from Redgate

Time is running out to submit your abstract for our hybrid PASS Data Community Summit 2022 conference! If you're an expert in a data-related topic that you think would be perfect for the Summit 2022 program, we want to hear from you. Whether you're planning to attend in-person or online, all session submissions and speakers will be considered for this year's event. Don't miss your chance to speak at the leading conference for data platform pros, submit your proposal before March 31.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Calling the Intercom API with Power Query and Refreshing in the Power BI Service

Meagan Longoria from Data Savvy

I needed to pull some user data for an app that uses Intercom. While I will probably import the data using Data Factory or a function in the long...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - ADX and KQL – Azure Monitor Logs in Azure Data Studio

Martin Catherall from measure twice, cut once.

G’day, I recently wrote about the Kusto Query Language Extension that’s available as an plugin for Azure Data Studio along with KQL Magic. The main reason that people have...

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Using Collation in SQL Server
At what levels can we set collation in SQL Server 2019?
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)

Azure Locks

In a resource or subscription in Azure, I can set a lock to limit actions. What are the two lock levels I can set?

Answer: CanNotDelete and ReadOnly

Explanation: The two lock levels are CanNotDelete and ReadOnly. The locks are called Delete and Read-only in the portal. Ref: Lock Resources to prevent unexpected changes - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/lock-resources?tabs=json

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 - Development

Remove some text - I would like to remove rtf from my Note column. I tried this: SELECT Note, LTRIM(Note, 'rtf') from [PatientNote]. I get an error. Please advise? I also tried the Replace function, but no text are altered/deleted.

OPENJSON - unnamed nested array - Currently working on sql script to extract from JSON file(s) but i've come across an unnamed array within a named array Wondering if anybody had any idea how to extract this? rest of my script is working fine using CROSS APPLY OPENJSON to extract what i require and where the arrays are named i'm having […]

Trigger: Need help to save activity log on delete - Hi, My table design as following, CREATE TABLE [dbo].[SFAProject]( [Id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [TenderName] [varchar](200) NULL, [ClientsId] [int] NOT NULL, [SalesPersonId] [nvarchar](450) NULL, [SFAStageId] [int] NOT NULL, [SFATenderCategoryId] [int] NOT NULL, [SubmitDate] [date] NOT NULL, [TenderValue] [decimal](18, 2) NULL, [TenderCost] [decimal](18, 2) NULL, [TenderRemark] [varchar](500) NULL, [CrtBy] [nvarchar](450) NULL, [CrtDte] [datetime] NULL, [UpdBy] [nvarchar](450) […]

SQL Server 2016 - Administration

AG changed to Distributed state - Hi, AG Listener does not get connected application due to Availability Group name (primary) changed to Distributed state automatically and second node Availability Group name resolving state, also both the nodes databases not synchronized. Please suggest what could be reason and why automatically AG state changed? Availability Group name - existing setting was Manual failover […]

sys.sql_logins - Hello, When I run the following query aginst a "remote" SQL Server, using a Linked Server, all the information is returned EXCEPT DaysUntilExpiration and PasswordExpiration. They are all NULL. When I run the same query "locally" on the SQL Server (of course, not using the Linked Server) all the information is returned INCLUDING DaysUntilExpiration and […]

SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

SQL Server Jobs - Retry Attempts - I know in SQL Server jobs, if a step fails, you can set the number of retries and interval. What I want to do though is if a step fails, retry the entire job from Step 1, not just the individual step. The reason I need to do it this way, is that the first […]

Order of processing of windows function - Hi Experts, Please can you let me know the order of processing of the window functions, The second in order DENSE_RANK is executed first before the first one, is this right ? when I add group by to the below commands, there is no change whatsoever. May I know why group by has no impact […]

SQL 2012 - General

Scalability in SQL and NoSQL? - Hello All, I am working on a web application project and I want to know which database design is right from a scalability point of view between SQL and NoSQL. According to this source, SQL is vertically scalable (Add resources to increase the capacity of the existing hardware and software) and I have no idea […]

SQL Server 2019 - Development

Refactoring an Entity Attribute Value schema - Apologies in advance, as I know this has been discussed a million times already but I think our requirement is slightly different from the norm in that we have a well-defined, static set of attributes up front and our values are rows in a table. But feel free to ignore if you've had enough of […]

Amazon AWS and other cloud vendors

AWS S3 Questions - Hi all, Just starting out with AWS and had a few questions.. What are requests? And what constitutes a request? How can I figure out how many requests my backup product (Veeam, Rapid Recovery) will be making? Our backup products do not support directly backing up to glacier, and I'd like to save costs as […]

General Cloud Computing Questions

Few questions about cloud computing course - Hi I'm currently doing a networks management degree level 7. I'm in the final year of the level 7 and I'm the only one in the course who wants to go onto the level 8 add on cloud computing and infrastructure. 1: would the college still do the course if I was the only one […]

Azure Data Factory

ODBC Source into Data Flow Activity - I would like to work with an ODBC source in Azure Data Flow. However I understand that ODBC is currently not a supported Data Source. It was recommended on the Microsoft website that I move the data into into a supported data source and then use that in the Data Flow. Does anyone know of […]

Reporting Services

Dynamic Drop Down in SSRS - In SSRS reporting, is it possible to dynamically drive drop down values based on a main table and sub table? (e.g. Category and SubCategory). For example, I have the following two tables: -- DROP TABLE #c CREATE TABLE #c (CategoryID int, CategoryDesc varchar(100)) INSERT INTO #c VALUES (1, 'Fruit') INSERT INTO #c VALUES (2, 'Veggie') […]

Create 1 calendar for each student - Hello! I'm attempting to replace a clunky mail merge process with SSRS 2016. The data is the attendance code for a list of students on each school day of a month. (picture Columns: Student_id, School_Date, Attendance_Code for a given month) I need to depict their attendance on a calendar, simply placing the contents of Attendance_Code […]

Integration Services

Split column on Data Types - Please assist? I would like to split column Event in two columns based on data types.

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