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Question of the Day

Configurations that take effect on RECONFIGURE

The Voice of the DBA

Daily Coping Tip

Choose to see something good about what has gone wrong

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.

Digging into an AI Algorithm

One of the more successful uses of AI (artificial intelligence) has been in the medical field. It seems that there is a tremendous amount of data, high variability in some aspects of the target of the data (the patient), and a need to constantly review very tedious volumes of data. A place where AI might, and has, made a difference to help humans, not replace them.

There's a neat article that dives into a bit of how a medical algorithm works for detecting sepsis. As you scroll, the article tries to explain in layman's terms what the AI system(s) are doing. It goes through the necessity of regular data, which I think is a good design to push humans to gather data. It then talks about a variety of neural networks being used to analyze data, based on previous training from humans and past results.

It's interesting to think of multiple nodes coming to their own conclusions are different times of the day and then later nodes looking at the results of previous nodes. That's what a human would often do, looking back at recent history and giving that some weight. The system comes up with a number that a human can use to consider in their diagnosis.

It is interesting that the article talks about the need for humans to better communicate to use this system. I think that's often a key with any computer assistance. The humans still need to use the computer as a tool and not as the final decision maker. However, at least in this instance, the tool seems to be helping reduce deaths in the hospital. I would hope that this is because the algorithm is detecting some patterns that are easy for a doctor to miss. It could be because the new system is focusing people's attention better, and possibly this is a combination of both of these possibilities.

I do think that AI systems can be very helpful in assisting humans in many tasks, and medicine might be one of the places where AI will be most useful. The sheer volumes of data, the complexity of the cases, and the load placed on medical workers to monitor many people can overwhelm any one doctor or nurse. Having a system that might remind them of a small detail will hopefully save lives.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

Featured Contents

Tracking Configuration Changes Against a Baseline

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from SQLServerCentral

One of the great things about SQL Server is that the platform has grown to include a number of configuration options and switches that allow a DBA to get the most performance from their instance that is possible. One of the downsides of the platform, however, is that any sysadmin can make changes (or db_owner […]

Increasing the Visibility of Database Changes in Flyway Development

Additional Articles from Redgate

If you save a metadata 'model' for every new version of a database created by Flyway, you can compare the current model to the previous one to see what changed. In turn, you can then generate a database E-R diagram that highlights the changed objects, instantly making those changes visible to other team members

Identify and Correct a Large SQL Server Error Log

Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com

Learn how to find and remove a large SQL Server Error Log file when it consumes a lot of space on your drive

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - EXECUTE AS USER vs EXECUTE AS LOGIN

Kenneth.Fisher from SQLStudies

I use impersonation a lot. It’s a really easy way to check if someone has the permissions they are supposed ... Continue reading

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Power BI: Data Quality Checks Using Python & SQL

DataOnWheels from DataOnWheels

Picture this, you have a report in Power BI that someone passes off to you for data quality checks. There are a few ways to make sure your measures...

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Configurations that take effect on RECONFIGURE
I am experimenting on a development instance with changing some configuration options using sp_configure to try and improve performance. I know that these values are stored in sys.configurations. I am also aware that in production, I am not supposed to change values that require a reboot. How do I query those values that I can change and have take effect using the RECONFIGURE statement?
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)

Can the Developer ALTER the Table?

I have created a new database on a development server and added the user, JoeUser, as a user in this database. This user has no rights other than to connect to the database.

I then execute this code:

CREATE SCHEMA Dev
GO
GRANT CONTROL ON SCHEMA::Dev TO JoeUser

JoeUser connects and runs this code:

CREATE TABLE Dev.MyTable (myid INT)

This works. However, can JoeUser now run this code successfully?

ALTER TABLE dev.MyTable ADD newid INT
GO

Answer: Yes

Explanation: The developer can run this code, as they own and control the table they created. Ref:

GRANT Schema permissions - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/grant-schema-permissions-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver16
GRANT Database Permissions - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/grant-database-permissions-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver16

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 Server is slow - I have a user who is complaining about a job he is running from the application server is slow. The server has 110 GB of memory allocated to SQL Server out of 128 GB. The job runs in 2 minutes everyday but today it is taking hours. CPU is staying below 10%, not much activity […]

SQL Server 2016 - Administration

What the symbols represent for ( newbie ) - Attach the database ER diagram , as you can see , there are symbols in front of the keys , eg. P , F , FK, key , red asterisk , two green lines , U etc , just would like to know what this symbols represent , what is its function ? is there […]

Replication Needs Reinitialized after Server Migration - We migrated a virtual server with transactional replication publications to a new data center. We used CommVault server-level replication to move it. We were surprised when all the subscriptions started having the error "The initial snapshot for publication is not yet available". The servers for the subscribers (push subscriptions) were not migrated yet and […]

SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

SQL FileStream - Concurrency support - Hi team, We have already enabled a SQL filestream for storing API request and response contents in one of our audit table. It works fine in PROD. Now we want to add more traffic to it, earlier, the traffic comes from 1 API, now we want to enable Audit for other APIs with request content […]

Calculating Intervals - I would like to check for eligible activities (is to take all activities between the last refuelling activity, and the current refuelling activity, and checking if the activities are eligible or not). It appears there are occurrence of multiple refuelling activities in an extremely short time frame. No activities between the transaction on […]

ISNULL function - I have found an explanation of the "ISNULL" on here: https://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_ref_sqlserver.asp What will be a good reason to use this function and spesificaly for views?

SQL 2012 - General

Noob SQLServer 2012 Question - Let me preface this with I am a sysadmin working on an SCOM 2016 install and have a question regarding an error message that keeps getting thrown via application event logs. An exception occurred while enqueueing a message in the target queue. Error: 15404, State: 19. Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user 'DOMAIN\ACCESSACCOUNT', […]

SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL

Intermittent "nesting level exceeded" error - We're having a very peculiar problem with the "Maximum stored procedure, function, trigger, or view nesting level exceeded (limit 32)" error and I was just wondering if the circumstances rang a bell with anybody. I'm certainly not expecting any form of in-depth investigation - that's my job. Here are the details: We continually run some […]

SQL Server 2019 - Administration

Best approach for column data type alters for a large table? - What is the general opinion on doing column datatype alters on a large table? I've got a table (SQL 2019 if that matters), ~500m rows, 104g in storage that has 2 columns currently as datetime, that need to be expanded to datetime2 for a new implementation and increased timestamp precision. I am fairly certain that […]

problem new dbrole with DDL Trigger - Hello, I create new db role only for some specific schema. This is normally working, but If I enabled our DDL trigger for checking some changes, then is error Msg 3616, Level 16, State 2, Line 23 An error was raised during trigger execution. The batch has been aborted and the user transaction, if any, […]

SQL Server 2019 - Development

SQL Query Best Approach Recommendations - I have a little exercise and would like to know your opinion on the most effective/best way to approach. Please see the result I am looking for at the bottom. Thank you in Advance. DATA: DECLARE @Trans TABLE (TransactionID INT , BillDate DATE , ParentTransaction INT) INSERT INTO @Trans(TransactionID , BillDate , ParentTransaction) VALUES (50 […]

Need to rearrange order of names from a fullname column to LAST, SUFFIX, FIRST - I currently have a FULLNAME field that is first last and suffix (Laverne Holley, LPN). I am trying to rearrange the name to be LASTNAME, SUFFIX, FIRSTNAME (Holley, LPN, Laverne) that is if there IS a suffix. Does anyone know how I can do this? Thank you! CURRENT OUTPUT: LAVERNE HOLLEY, LPN MEGAN WATERS DESIRED […]

Substring charindex Mid - Get name within String - Hi, I am trying to get the name inbetween the forward slash / for the column Full List There are cases where there are no forward slashes so I will take the name that is there or there may be just one forward slash / and so I will take the name after the forward […]

Integration Services

MS Data Services not showing in Visio - Please assist? I have downloaded SSDT: I am trying to get it work with Visio 2017. The two components worked. When i restarted my laptop the SSDT dissapeared from my Visio Studio. What am i doing wrong? Unsupported This version of Visual Studio is unable to open the following projects. The project types may […]

Design Ideas and Questions

simple cardinality question - I am tracking users and user interests that a user chooses. As in a user_id will pick all their interests(golf, tennis, bowling...) User(user_id, attribute1, attribute2...) User_interest(user_interest_id(sk), user_id, interest_id, attribute1) Interest(interest_id, interest_description) So User to User_interest is One to Zero or Many. Interest to User_interest is One to Many. I seem to sometimes get confused going […]

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