 | | The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News by SQLServerCentral.com | | Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge |
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Protecting Schools One very common targets for hackers are schools and universities. The latter may have plenty of resources for staff, but often school systems don't have that same type of budget. In many ways, it's sad that hackers would target schools that struggle to educate and help others. The staff often deals with low pay and high stress already, and losing access to computer systems adds to an already tough job. There was an interview this week with the director of technology at one district. Johnathan Kim works for the Woodland Hills school district and is a former staffer at the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command. That's the type of training that I think few school district employees have. I've known a few people who manage technology inside schools, and while they are often smart, capable people, they aren't security professionals. The interview talks about a few of the changes that Mr. Kim has made, such as enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) and removing local admin rights for many teachers. I know these are the types of rules that frustrate many workers who use computers. In fact, I ran into someone who rarely upgrades software on their development machine because so many applications require administrative rights and they don't want to bother opening tickets more than a few times a year. Two-factor authentication can be a pain, and I know I get confused sometimes as I have both 2FA and MFA with different processes for different systems. It's good in that a few times in the last year I've caught a hacking attempt, but it's also a pain to deal with when I'm doing something simple. I can see why people don't like it when they don't understand the challenges of securing systems. Every time I find myself frustrated, I stop and remember the problems others have had, especially those that have dealt with ransomware in their organizations. A good point in the interview is that education can help smooth the way for security practices that feel unnecessary or disruptive. It's good to remind ourselves why we want the least privileges needed assigned to others, and why those of us with privileged access need a second account for that access. We also ought to come up with a good story to educate others when they complain, perhaps using a story of a breach or loss to help remind others that our systems are constantly under attack. Steve Jones - SSC Editor Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums |
| 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 |
This article takes a strategic look at common data masking and anonymization techniques, and the challenges inherent in protecting certain types of sensitive and personal data, while ensuring that it still looks like the real data, and retains its referential integrity, and distribution characteristics. It also explains, briefly, with references, the tools that one can use to mask different types of data and how to provision development and test machines with these 'de-sensitized' databases, or alternatively to produce fake data that looks like the real thing, but in fact is generated randomly. |
This article demonstrates how to use Redgate Test Data Manager to automate the delivery and teardown of data containers (clones) on four different RDBMS platforms: SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL, for use in Flyway development projects. |
| AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services |
THE VIDEO THE SYNOPSIS In this video, I wrap up the series on classification and provide some quick-and-dirty tips on when to use each of the classification algorithms we... |
| Administration of SQL Server |
At the PGConf.dev, where Postgres developers get t... |
I recently received a complaint that Query Store f... |
I had a customer that was looking to document a restore that had occurred on one of their systems and didn’t see it. They had concerns about SQL Server... The... |
It’s a great question. Let’s say you want to capture stored procedure completions. But, you only want to capture them between 3AM and 4AM. Can you do it? Output... |
I wrote an article that was published on SQL Server Central on how to get your scripts into Git. This post adds a few more thoughts on how you... The... |
Note: I DO NOT recommend this. Any changes to a pi... |
If you are using Hyperscale in Azure SQL Database, you know that it is a powerful tier that lets you rapidly scale up and scale out your database according... |
After a data migration, we needed to decommission the old Azure SQL DBs, but we wanted to keep a copy in case we needed anything later. Enter exporting an... The... |
(Written on May 30th, 2024) If you come across a credential named something like 'https://xxyyzz.blob.core.windows.net/sqldbtdlogs' in the sys.database_scoped_credentials table of your Azure SQL Database and are unsure of its purpose. it is likely related to... |
| Career, Employment, and Certifications |
Looking back on my career, it dawned on me that I ... |
DIVERSIFY! We devote a lot of time to mastering the technology that we are passionate about or use for our jobs. For example, I specialized in Microsoft business intelligence,... The... |
Reading Time: 2 minutes In this post I want to provide some clarification as to which Microsoft Fabric workloads and other items are currently covered in the DP-600... |
Recently, a workshop attendee asked for tips on how to handle a situation in which someone else is advancing your slides. I strongly believe the presenter is the best person... |
Learn about Azure CLI and how to manage your Azure resources using commands instead of using the Azure portal. |
DESCRIPTION  Let us talk about the power of act... |
| Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google, AWS) |
Running telco workloads in the public cloud is no ... |
| Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars |
Did you know that the general program for PASS Data Community Summit 2024 (November 4-8) was recently unveiled? This year's lineup includes over 150 different sessions being delivered by over 140 speakers! This year's program also includes 16 incredible full day pre-cons, taking place on November 4 and 5, plus 6 different learning pathways to choose from. Join PASS Summit on-site for a whole week of connecting, sharing and learning with industry experts. Register before July 16 to secure a 3-day ticket at the early bird rate. |
Next Tuesday, pricing on the 3-day tickets for the PASS Data Community Summit goes up to $2,095. But if you register right now, plus use coupon code BRENTO24, it’s... |
Hello Hello, We. Are. Back! The schedule for EightKB 2024 Edition has been announced! We’re kicking off at 1pm UTC on August 8th (8th of the 8th…get it? ... The... |
Happy Fourth of July to all who celebrate! I’m looking forward to a great view Thursday evening looking west along the Skagit Valley with some friends up at Camp... |
Everything You Know About Isolation Levels Is Wrong The PASS Data Summit session lineup has been announced! And, you know, since me and Kendra are double-teaming two days of precons... |
A proxy function or wrapper function allows you to deploy a custom version of a function or cmdlet while the internal functionality remains implemented. That means you can get a core cmdlet or function, add parameters (or remove), and write the code for these parameters, customizing a new version of this core cmdlet or function. Also, we get the begin, process and end block exposed from the PowerShell advanced functions, allowing control over the command steppable pipeline. |
In this post I’ll demo how to export XML files from SQL Server via PowerShell. |
A proxy function or wrapper function allows you to deploy a custom version of a function or cmdlet while the internal functionality remains implemented. That means you can get... |
| DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) |
This article demonstrates more complex scenarios and best practices for automating SQL deployments using GitHub Actions on an Azure SQL database. |
| HA/DR/Always On/Clustering |
Transitioning from a failover cluster configuratio... |
Multiple companies offer high-capacity SSDs, but u... |
Following on from my last post on the Query Memory Limit in Power BI, in this post I want to look at one of the most common DAX antipatterns... |
| Microsoft Fabric ( Azure Synapse Analytics, OneLake, ADLS, Data Science) |
Koen Verbeeck talks permissions: We are starting a new analytics project in Microsoft Fabric, and our data will land in a warehouse. This is the… |
When loading data, it is always important to load the data with performance and scalability in mind. For lakehouse tables to return queries quickly and to scale it is... |
| Performance Tuning SQL Server |
A Little About Hash Join Spills And Bailouts In SQ... |
A Little About Hash Aggregate Spills and SLEEP_TASK Waits In SQL Server Thanks for watching! Going Further If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning... |
I love QuickieStore, but I wanted some columns to be at the front end of the results returned. Namely, I wanted top_waits, query_sql_text, and query_plan right after database name.... The... |
In this article we discuss how to store data temporally in PostgreSQL. Temporal database store data in a way that allows you to see not only what the value of any column is currently, but at any point in time that your system is created to handle. In this three part series, I will aim to define what kind of information can be obtained from temporal tables and how to express requests for this information as SQL queries. |
Learn how to configure key parameters to boost Transactions Per Second (TPS) and improve overall database performance. The post Key PostgreSQL Configuration Parameters for Enhanced Performance appeared first... |
This post debates the current sort cost model, identifies its shortcomings, and proposes a new, more comprehensive model that expands the scope of the optimiser search. Designing this post... |
This post contains the slides from the talk that I gave at PGConf.dev in Vancouver a few weeks ago, together with the transcript and other information. ... |
| PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI |
You've seen how you can use Power Query within Pow... |
When we think of Power BI projects we typically think of solving business problems through creating insightful analytical reports and dashboards, Power BI is fantastic for this. However, when... |
| Product Reviews and Articles |
This article demonstrates how to adapt your current database development and testing regimes to use clones (data containers) in Redgate Test Data Manager. It demonstrates how to handle dynamic... |
| Product Upgrades and Releases |
The next release would normally be August, but I’m doing a release a little early in order to fix 2 issues with the Consultant Toolkit. The May release broke... |
Let’s play with some dragons. Dragons from the Jurassic park or the board game dungeon and dragons. The algorithm is a fractal curve of Hausdorff dimension 2. One starts... |
| SQL Server Security and Auditing |
This post is part of our SQL Server security blog ... |
Dark Reading chats with Johnathan Kim, director of technology at the Woodland Hills School District in North Braddock, Penn., about why cybercriminals target schools — and what they can... |
It’s a serious one: The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSH’s server (sshd), allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as root on glibc-based Linux systems; that... |
Last week, I wrote about The State of Data Breache... |
Some dealerships are losing revenue amid slow sales and demand. |
Can anything that is programmable have an embedded LLM? Apparently so. llama.ttf is a plain old font that looks like Open Sans—you can download it and install it. We... |
Workers are now comfortable delegating nearly half of their tasks to AI and expect to trust AI even more to operate autonomously in the future, a Salesforce survey reveals. |
Here's how low-code/no-code solutions are addressing the developer shortage and transforming application development. |
Today, we have an interesting one. It's not technically a Code SOD, because it doesn't have any code. It isn't quite a feature, because it doesn't contain a story.... |
Johannes started debugging an application, and decided he needed to "share his pain". Here, we're presented with a simple problem: convert a number in the range [0-25] to a letter... |
| Virtualization and Containers/Kubernetes |
Welcome to part 2 of our Docker Logging Guide seri... |
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