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Daily Coping Tip

Think about how your actions make a difference for others

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.

Cloud Adoption 2020

The cloud is an amorphous thing, ill defined, and likely meaning something different to different people. We have IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS, and more. Ultimately, as the joke goes, the cloud is just someone else's computer. That is true, but how you use someone else's computer is the trick. I used to virtually wander around the computer lab in college, finding lightly used machines and opening X Windows sessions on other machines to perform compilations or other resource intensive tasks. I assumed we'd all this regularly at home and inside of organizations by now. Maybe the cloud is the evolution of this idea.

OReilly has a radar where they examine technologies and survey their readers. This year (2020), they conducted a cloud survey in January and published their results recently. There are some interesting numbers in the survey, with over 1000 responses. Of these, 88% reported using the cloud in some sense. I think that makes a lot of sense as email services could account for a lot of usage. Add in the Goole Office suite or 0365, and lots of organizations would use these instead of managing the software themselves.

There were some surprising items for me. While I do expect plenty of organizations use more than one cloud (>50%), it's not evenly distributed. Most people use AWS, even those in Azure or GCP, though that's not symmetrical usage. AWS has the largest market share and plenty of their users don't use other clouds. I expect more organizations, especially larger ones, to start using more than one cloud for reliability in the future, especially as the use of containers and Kubernetes (or some orchestration) grow and make things more portable.

I was surprised that the responses indicated that 25% of the orgs expected to move 100% of their applications to the cloud. I don't know what percentage we have moved at Redgate, but we've moved most things. The other numbers of people moving significant percentages to the cloud are also surprising. Maybe they shouldn't be as many of used to operate on 2-4 year hardware cycles. Cloud computing has become very reliable, so rather than make new capital investments, maybe it makes sense to move to the cloud for more and more organizations.

Of those that aren't moving, the desire to keep data on premises or data security/regulatory concerns dominate. I know plenty of people don't trust cloud vendors more than their own staff. I won't argue that point, but my view is that there are more experts at the cloud vendors, and the tools are better for configuring and managing security than what most companies have. You might be the exception, but staffs turnover and that might not be the case next year. To me, that's a good reason to move stuff to the cloud, use Infrastructure-as-Code to document your setup and keep improving security over time. I'd also point out the financial institutions are among those highly represented in the cloud, and despite the headlines, data security is important to them.

There is a lot of data to view, and it's worth your time to read. Whether you like the cloud, hate it, distrust it, desire it, whatever, it pays to be informed about the state of our industry and be aware of what others are doing. Of course, don't take this as evidence that the cloud is better or worse for your company. As pointed out numerous times, the respondents often don't have complete visibility into what their organization is doing. It's unlikely, IMHO,  that either 0% o 100% adoption is happening, especially in large organizations.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

 
 Featured Contents

Microsoft SQL Server Utilities and Tools

kast218 from SQLServerCentral.com

Useful free and paid utilities and tools for Microsoft SQL Server - complete list of 275 Utilities

How to Add Help to PowerShell Scripts

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PowerShell scripts are the tool of choice for many admins, but how do you make them easy for others to use? In this article, Greg Moore shows how to add professional looking help to your scripts that work just like the help in cmdlets.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Power BI Incremental Refresh with Web API Data Source

Dustin Ryan from SQL with Dustin Ryan

It’s been a while since I typed up a blog post but life, even in the midst of a pandemic, has been busy and crazy. As you can imagine,...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Monitoring Power BI

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There are a number of options for monitoring Power BI that I wanted to mention: Performance analyzer: Find out how each of your report elements, such as visuals and...

 

 Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

 

Clearing Database Cache

I have a SQL Server 2019 instance and I want to clear the procedure cache, but only for the plans used by one database, Sales. How should I do this?

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

 

 

 Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Greg Larsen)

Estimate a count

Which of these is an expression that can be used in SQL Server 2019 when performance is more important than accuracy to get a unique count?

Answer: APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT([Column])

Explanation: The answer is 3. This is a new function, APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT, added to SQL Server 2019. The value returned will be within 2 or 3 percent of the actual value but will be returned more quickly and with less CPU overhead. Answer 1 will work, but this will not necessarily run faster and will give the exact value. Answers 2 and 4 will return syntax errors. Reference: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/sql/t-sql-programming/there-is-a-new-count-in-town/

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
sys.dm_db_file_space_usage - I've been reading up on sys.dm_db_file_space_usage and see a lot of examples of how to convert the results to MB / GB.   However, none these methods work for me... or if they do, I don't understand them. When I run use tempdb; go select * from sys.dm_db_file_space_usage; For the total_page_count I get 85184.00. That's […]
SQL Server 2017 - Development
Global Temporary Tables and dynamic sql string - I have a script: if OBJECT_ID('temptable') is not null drop table temptable go if OBJECT_ID('tempdb.dbo.##t') is not null drop table ##t go create table temptable(EmployeeID varchar(50), ProjectID varchar(50)) go declare @s varchar(4000) set @s = 'SELECT top 10 T.EmployeeID into ##t FROM temptable T' exec (@s) set @s = ' drop table ##t SELECT top […]
HTML Mail with more than one line in Resultset - Hello all, i would like to send a html Mail with sql server. But i can´t solve it by more than one line. Resultset: Select car,model,engine from cars Honda, Civic, 1.6 VW, Golf, 1.5 Dodge, Viper, 8.4 In my Mail i would receive a html table with:[…]
CarModelEngine
Honda
SSIS Export Flat File as Fixed Width - Hi Forum, I have a table that uses the script below to create fields with Spaces at the start of the field value. The way this works is if,for example, a field length is set at 12 characters and the value for the field is 8 characters long, it should have 4 spaces at the […]
SQL Server 2016 - Administration
Index Maintenance - I need a query to  find the unused indexes and missing indexes on all tables in a database.also for creation of index recommendations on tables.  
SQL Server 2019 - Administration
WSFC option missing in Availability Group Wizard - Hi, I have installed SQLServer 2019, and Windows Server Failover Cluster feature. I want to create a AO Availability Group. I start the create wizard, and in the "Specify availability group options" page the WSFC cluster type is missing. I only can choose EXTERNAL or NONE. Is there something I am forgetting? From what i […]
Using MS SQL Server Security mechanisms in a three-tier architecture - I am trying to understand how I can use the db server authentication - authorization mechanisms and user related tables, but I cant find any resource simple enough to grasp the whole concept. What I am trying to do is to not have my own tables for users, roles etc. but use the platform's syslogins, […]
SQL Server 2019 - Development
Nested Json Parsing issue - Greetings, I am having issues parsing the following Json string using openjson. I am having problems getting at the piece under custom fields. If I omit that, I can bring in the rest of the fields. Looking at other posts, it looks like it requires multiple cross apply statements but I haven't got the syntax […]
Reporting Services
SSRS 2014 - Page Break to follow a sub-report? - Hi everyone, Really really need help on this one.   You would think that page breaks would be easy to do, but alas, SSRS is not doing what I told it to do.   Of course, I am assuming that I simply haven't told it the exactly correct way to go about it.   I have a report […]
SSRS 2016
SSRS Branding - Different Font Colour for Primary and Secondary Bar? - I have followed a few different guides for branding SSRS and these all work but it seems impossible to have the text in the first bar (top-right showing Settings, Download and Help on same line as the logo) to be different to the bar below this (showing Favorites and Browse). The logo is dark blue […]
Analysis Services
AS Tabular and Sample Data in VS - Hello all, I really need your help – I want to use the sample data in an Analysis Services Project in the Visual Studio, but the sample Data from the Sample Partitions will not be displayed. The actual situation: I use a Tabular AS Server 2016 and 2019 Visual Studio 2019 with the latest Data […]
Anything that is NOT about SQL!
Replacing Remote Desktop Connection Manager - So RDCM is no longer being supported by Microsoft, but it was such a useful tool. I'm looking for alternatives that have the ability to group server connections and save those names so I don't have to type them in every time. Any thoughts on a good replacement for it?
COVID-19 Pandemic
Daily Coping 26 May 2020 - Today’s tip is to share an inspiring quote with others to give them a boost. My thoughts: https://voiceofthedba.com/2020/05/26/daily-coping-26-may-2020/
Daily Coping 25 May 2020 - Today’s tip is to share photos of 2 things you find meaningful or memorable. My thoughts: http://voiceofthedba.com/2020/05/25/daily-coping-25-may-2020/
Article Discussions by Author
Microsoft SQL Server Utilities and Tools - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Microsoft SQL Server Utilities and Tools
 

 

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