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Question of the Day

Backing up the Database Encryption Key

The Voice of the DBA

Technology Fears

Recently I had a friend traveling who is not very tech savvy. This person has traveled before and has a routine, but in this case, they were struggling to get an airline's mobile app to work. They also struggled with the website, and just before the trip, they were thinking to cancel because they didn't have a ticket in their hand before driving to the airport.

This turned out to be a login issue, and between friends and the airline's customer service, they were able to print out a ticket at home and take it in hand to the airport.

It was slightly funny to me, but it got me thinking about the fears people have about technology. Many of these fears are really about change, but I would guess most of us have been burned by technology at some point. There's an app, a process, a system that fails and causes us stress/hassles/annoyances/money/etc.

Today I'm wondering if there is a technology are you afraid of or that you worry about more than average. Perhaps you have friends that worry about technology and have concerns. Drop a note in the comments, and I bet we'll have some funny discussions.

This summer, my wife and I took a ride in a Waymo in San Francisco. It was a neat experience, and I enjoyed it, but when my wife posted a video, we were amazed how many friends of ours were unwilling to consider riding in one. We are Tesla owners, and we've been impressed with FSD, but my wife is also unwilling to use the basic Autopilot most of the time because it's not reliable. Even FSD was something we were careful in using.

I live in the digital world often. I rarely use paper for anything, other than taking notes. Even then I often take pictures of notes and upload them for reference or for retyping. I pay for most things with digital money. I walk through life where technology manages supply chains, border admissions, airline flights, and almost everything I interact with. Even the vehicles I use at the ranch have lots of technology in them, though I admit I'm glad when something has analog parts I can work with.

I'm not sure there's much technology I'm afraid of, though I am wary of some connected devices. Not because of the tech, but because I don't think the vendors do a good job of security.

I can't really think of what technology worries me. Even AI is likely to be less dangerous/useful/amazing/whatever than people think. I think the one part of tech that worries me the most is how it affects society and many people whose jobs are threatened by tech. Though maybe I shouldn't worry. Those tech-averse people might be the reason we see growth in the travel agent world, which I thought was dead.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Step by step guide to setup PostgreSQL on Docker

Arvind Toorpu from SQLServerCentral

Learn how to get started with PostgreSQL using a container to practice database skills.

How To Embed Your Azure Logic Apps in a Metadata-driven Data Platform

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

In this article, I am going to explain how you can dial your productivity up to 11 when you’re dealing with a lot of Azure Logic Apps in your data platform.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Tell me the positives of your solution

K. Brian Kelley from Databases – Infrastructure – Security

I still have a tendency to talk about all the cons of a proposed solution I don’t believe is the optimal one. There’s an old saying that “no one...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Using SQL Compare in Read-Only Databases

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from The Voice of the DBA

Recently a customer asked if SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare can be used with a read-only database as a source. It’s a good questions as I’ve seen some...

Azure SQL Revealed: A Guide to the Cloud for SQL Server

Site Owners from SQLServerCentral

Access detailed content and examples on Azure SQL, a set of cloud services that allows for SQL Server to be deployed in the cloud. This book teaches the fundamentals of deployment, configuration, security, performance, and availability of Azure SQL from the perspective of these same tasks and capabilities in SQL Server. This distinct approach makes this book an ideal learning platform for readers familiar with SQL Server on-premises who want to migrate their skills toward providing cloud solutions to an enterprise market that is increasingly cloud-focused.

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Backing up the Database Encryption Key
In my SQL Server 2022 database, I run this: USE Sales; GO CREATE DATABASE ENCRYPTION KEY WITH ALGORITHM = AES_256 ENCRYPTION BY SERVER CERTIFICATE MyServerCert; GO This works, but I want to prepare for the future and potential issues. How do I back up my DEK?
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)

Using Outer Joins

I have this data in a SQL Server 2019 database:

Customer table
CustomerID CustomerName
1          Steve
2          Andy
3          Brian
4          Allen
5          Devin
6          Sally

OrderHeader table
OrderID CustomerID OrderDate
1       1          2024-02-01
2       1          2024-03-01
3       3          2024-04-01
4       4          2024-05-01
6       4          2024-05-01
7       3          2024-06-07
8       2          2024-04-07

I want a list of all customers and their order counts for a period of time, including zero orders. If I run this query, how many rows are returned?

SELECT 
  c.CustomerName, COUNT(oh.OrderID)
 FROM dbo.Customer AS c
LEFT JOIN dbo.OrderHeader AS oh ON oh.CustomerID = c.CustomerID
WHERE oh.Orderdate > '2024/04/01'
GROUP BY c.CustomerName

Answer: 3

Explanation: Three rows are returned. The left outer join takes place first, and then the results are filtered. In this case, the zeros are filtered. Ref: Fun with Outer Joins - https://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/fun-with-outer-joins

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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

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Development - SQL Server 2014

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SQL Server 2019 - Administration

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SQL Server 2019 - Development

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how to force SS to run certain SP in parallel? - hi everyone I have a SP that is run in SSIS. That particular SP is basically running a bunch of SP. See below for code. SP1 and SP2 are independent of each other so they can definitely be run in parallel. They all read data from the same table but each writes to a different […]

cannot read the next data row for dataset x - Hi, a peer asked me today to help on this ssrs error. There is a lot going on in this report but the dataset in question uses a table meant just for ssrs and is filtered in the report by the userid of the person running the report. When i run the query with a […]

SQL Azure - Development

Copying table data efficiently - Environment: Azure db with P15 (4000 DTU) Table 1: Having 90 coluumns of which 25 columnd encrypted , having approximately 60 million records Table 2: Exact similar structure as Table 1 with no records Requirement : Need to copy data from Table 1 to Table 2 In quicker time and least usage of DTUs. workdone: […]

Reporting Services

Report server errors - http://servername/reports/browse/ could not load folder contents http://servername/reportserver The server principal "NT SERVICE\SQLServerReportingServices" is not able to access the database "ReportServerTempDB" under the current security context. How do I fix this ? Does this have anything to do with SPNs ?https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/reporting-services/report-server/register-a-service-principal-name-spn-for-a-report-server?view=sql-server-2017

Reporting Services (2019) - Changing Service Account - This is something that happened while investigating a problem - so not impacting me any more - but I wonder what I'm missing. When trying to change the Service Account in the Reporting Services Configuration Manager from built-in to a domain account, it fails to connect to the database with the error: A connection could […]

Design Ideas and Questions

Should testing of Business Report changes be allowed in Prod? - When I arrived at the company 2.5 years ago, the environments were a mess! Dev crap in Prod, Prod stuff in dev, many databases didn't have a Dev version, etc. It has been a grueling marathon, but the environment is mostly stabilized. I've even set up a PreProd environment where users can test deployments or […]

MySQL

MySQL joining - a tricky problem from a newby - Hi, I'm not even sure whether this is possible. I've three tables, one containing a location ID, and a location name. The second table is a users table, which contains the kind of information you'd expect, i.e. name address etc. The third table is a transactions table containing rows describing transactions which can be described […]

SQL Server 2022 - Administration

Blocking Connection to Server - Good Afternoon, We recently procured a service management software for our company, which uses SQL server 2019( 15.0.2125.1) as backend. The client application uses sql usernames to login into the application . I find this as a security issue, as any internal user can directly connect to the server either through ODBC or through SSMS […]

Migrating standalone database to always-on cluster. - I am planning to migrate a currently standalone database to SQL Always On. This would be an OS & SQL upgrade & migrate activity to an entire new box of servers running on latest Windows Server & SQL Server. I have never perform this configuration before and will be referring to steps which is stated […]

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