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The Voice of the DBA

Changing Context and Data Reuse

One of the points of the GDPR that I thought was very interesting was the idea that users needed to give consent for data use for specific purposes. This had many companies trying to reaffirm consent last year while others assumed previous consent was valid. No matter how you viewed the law, any change in the way that a subject’s data was used required new consent.

We don’t have a law like that in the US, and that allowed IBM to scrape images from Flickr to use in facial recognition software. This isn’t dramatically different from lots of scraping that goes on from other sites, where plenty of data is aggregated, but there is certainly some private data being used for new purposes. When Netflix created a contest to help build a recommendations engine, they shared data, albeit in a way they thought was anonymous. It wasn’t.

The article from Tim O’Reilly and Mike Loukidesi is an interesting look on privacy, rights, and consent for data use. Many of us click through overly broad rights agreements, many of which I think should be more limited by law and regulation. Unfortunately we seem to allow data to be aggregated, reused, and re-sold, often without any input or redress for the individuals to whom the data refers. The article notes that often the context of how the data is used changes, so it’s not whether the data is public or private, but rather how the data is used.

I think this is a better way to examine data, and perhaps one that courts and arbitrators ought to be charged with protecting. Too many companies play fast and loose with data usage, and in an area of larger and larger data driven companies, I’m not sure I see a public interest for the rights of companies to trump those of individuals. Especially where privacy and security are concerned.

I rejoice in the tremendous amount of data in the world and the opportunities it brings for many to learn more about their lives. I appreciate the opportunities I have to work with data. I think data helps companies provide better services and build more efficient processes. I also think that many companies take advantage of the data to increase their revenues without understanding that there should be some rights for the people that did not agree to, and do not want to participate in the new uses of data.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Featured Contents

Uploading On-Premises Data as JSON to Azure Blob Storage using SSIS

epivaral from SQLServerCentral.com

Using Azure Feature Pack for Integration Services to access Blob storage from Azure into SSIS packages

Its time to accelerate the State of DevOps

Additional Articles from Redgate

Redgate is joining forces with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), now part of Google Cloud, as a sponsor of the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, and we’re excited to see what the research uncovers.
This year, the survey’s focus areas include deployment toolchains, cloud, disaster recovery, the technical environment, how we work, and more. Take the survey to help us understand how to make the (software) world better.

Compressed Microsoft SQL Server Backups by Default

Additional Articles from Database Journal

Learn how to create default database compression for your SQL Server databases.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Cool Stuff in Snowflake – Part 8: Time Travel

Koen Verbeeck from SQLServerCentral

I’m doing a little series on some of the nice features/capabilities in Snowflake (the cloud data warehouse). In each part, I’ll highlight something that I think it’s interesting enough to…

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Storytelling Without Data?

Meagan Longoria from SQLServerCentral

There are many great resources out there for data visualization. Some of my favorite data viz people are Storytelling With Data (b|t), Alberto Cairo (b|t), and Andy Kirk (b|t)….

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Creating Statistics
When I use CREATE STATISTICS with multiple columns, what data is used for the histogram?
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)

Stop a Login

I have a login on my SQL Server 2017 instance that a contractor was using to do work in our environment. The contractor has left, and I are not sure if they will come back, but I do not want to lose all the setup and permissions. How can I prevent anyone from using this login without affecting the password that was used?

The Login was for CarolD.

Answer: Use this code: ALTER LOGIN CarolD DISABLE

Explanation: The easiest way to do this is to disable the login. You could disable an AD account if this were Windows Auth, but inside of SQL Server, you can use ALTER LOGIN with the DISABLE option to prevent the login from being used. Ref: ALTER LOGIN - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/alter-login-transact-sql?view=sql-server-2017

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 Agent scheduled job taking too long time to run in SQL Server 2014 - I am having a quite strange problem- the scheduled job in SQL Server Agent is taking abnormally long time to run. However the same job when I right click on the job and select “Start job at step…”, it finishes at desired time. Usually the job should be finished in about 15 to 17 minutes […]

t-sql 2012 row over partition - In the t-sql 2012 listed below there is a value that is determined in the Sped_Max column. There are times when the calculation of SUM(ISNULL(CONVERT(INT, C1023.value), 0)) + SUM(ISNULL(CONVERT(INT, c1024.value), 0))) DESC = 0. Can you tell me why me the value actually = 0, that nothing is displayed from the query Listed below? SELECT […]

Status Update 17 April 2019 - Some progress here, with less dev resources because of a few other internal fires. Forums – quoting posts should look better now, though a fix doesn’t help with code. I’d ask that you stop quoting the code, or at least delete the code when your reply is posted for now. Authors and newsletters linked in […]

Always on - Has anyone has configured always on from on premises to Azure cloud? If yes then have you ever came into any issues with that setup? Were there any pros and cons? Thanks

SQL Server Agent scheduled job taking abnormally long time to run - I am having a quite strange problem- the scheduled job in SQL Server Agent is taking abnormally long time to run. However the same job when I right click on the job and select “Start job at step…”, it finishes at desired time. Usually the job should be finished in about 15 to 17 minutes […]

HA: Reporting workload blocks redo threads due to IO contention - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/troubleshoot-primary-changes-not-reflected-on-secondary?view=sql-server-2017#BKMK_REDOBLOCK We have HA setup and we are finding that the redo thread falls behind. This tends to happen when there are large reporting workloads run against our secondary synchronous node. Are there any options besides just “run fewer queries against the other node”? If it was blocking we could address […]

SSRS Multi-Select parameter weridness - i’m not an SSRS guru but in the past the behavior of making a parameter multi-select would pass a comma delimited string. ie. selecting red and blue and green would give you ‘red,blue,green’ causing one to have to use some form of string split. However, I am working with a report that is passing the […]

How to sum a number of rows with minute data where column format is datetime - I’m working with a database where a column that includes duration in terms of minutes is stored as datetime. The data looks like this. Note the ‘1899-12-30’ info can be effectively ignored. Duration 1899-12-30 00:56:33.000 1899-12-30 00:26:27.000 1899-12-30 01:04:02.000 1899-12-30 00:13:30.000 1899-12-30 01:10:06.000 1899-12-30 00:23:02.000 1899-12-30 00:00:06.000 I am trying to do something like […]

Missing attachments - I remember there was an attachment to the following post (I’ve even got a post on this thread saying that I looked at it) and I can’t find it on the post anymore. https://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/topic/insert-to-clustered-index Also, it still appears that attachments to articles are not available. Any idea when this problem will be fixed?

Unexpexcted behaviour STGeomFromText - Hey guys, I’ve got a weird behavior of SQL-Server regarding spatial objects here. The code from below defines a postal code area in Frankfurt, Germany as a linestring. I want to transform this to a polygon, to check if some points are liying within this area. But the resulting polygon is way bigger, than the […]

Viewing database diagrams - Hi all We’ve designed some database diagrams on our DEV server (we have SA access). We want our analysts to be able to see these diagrams but we don’t want them to have db_owner access (even though it’s a DEV server). What I’ve done so far it to create a role within the database […]

On premises migration to Azure Managed Instance – link AAD login to db user - I am migrating an on premises SQL Server to Azure Managed Instance however having problems with changing the existing Windows groups database users to be Azure AD groups. I can manually add them by dropping users and recreating them but worried this will miss out some permissions as they are quite complex. Reading an article […]

Create a calculated member in a tabular model - Hello All, I am trying to add a calculated member in a dimension. In Multidimensional model, I do that like this: CREATE MEMBER [Material].[Department].[AB] ASAGGREGATE({[Material].[Department].&[A], [Material].[Department].&}) Is there a way to do the same in tabular model ?

Changing table data - Hi, I have a row in a table call ‘Time Reported’ with 29602 rows the data for the table looks like the below: 1899-12-30 09:12:32.000 each row has a different time but keeps the 1899-12-30 & .000 at the end. I beleive it is formatted like this because it was pulled from a old Access […]

Changing table data - Hi, I have a table name ‘Time Reported’ and the format of the data is : 1899-12-30 09:12:32.000 There are 29602 rows of data, this was imported from a old Access database i would like to run a SQL query to remove the 1899-12-30 & the .000 and leave the 09:12:32 Can anyone assist with […]

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