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Daily Coping Tip

Overcome frustration by trying out a new approach

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.

Scaling Serverless Azure

I enjoy reading articles and blogs about how people solve technical issues. The

Trainline blog has had some good posts over the years, and the Netflix tech blog always gets me to think, even thought I don't use many of their technology choices. There are others of course, but for the Microsoft tech, I run into some neat posts at the Microsoft Devblogs.

Recently I saw one from Davide Mauri on streaming at scale using Azure SQL Database. I really like the platform, but it still feels like something that needs maturity. Seeing this post with metrics, testing, and evaluation of how the system works with data gives me more confidence that this might work for a scenario I hadn't considered.

I love that the post includes lots of references to code and other explanations, making me think I could set this up and test it. Certainly I'd like to know more about the actual costs of the test, which is something missing from too many discussions of cloud implementations, especially PaaS ones.

An exception might be Troy Hunt's series on Azure and how he's built HaveIBeenPwned. This is a scaling post, though you can find others if you search around. He's disclosed the costs of things in some of his posts, which help me to understand how important choices are to both performance and your budget.

If you are looking to build systems in the cloud, I urge you to search out and read as many experiences as you can. Most of them boil down to write for the cloud, write good code, and test, but do so in a way that takes advantage of the cloud. Don't expect to just have things work for you, no matter how good a developer you are. You need to understand your tools, and the cloud is just another tool.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

 
 Featured Contents

Getting started with PostgreSQL on MacOS

aveek22 from SQLServerCentral

This article covers how to install PostgreSQL on the macOS.

Win a three-month subscription to Pluralsight

Additional Articles from Redgate

Redgate is giving you the chance to win a three-month subscription to Pluralsight (the technical skills training platform) in this month’s forum competition. To enter, simply share ‘how SQL Compare has helped you’.

DBA in training: Security

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Securing data is not always easy to do, but it should be the top responsibility for database administrators. From protecting the physical servers to preventing copies of backups files from getting into the wrong hands, there is a lot to consider. In this article, Pamela Mooney covers what DBAs need to think about when securing their organisation’s data.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide – Second Edition

Devin Knight from Devin Knight

Earlier this week I announced the release of a new Power Platform book. While I’m super excited about that book I’m also excited to announce

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Adding a user to an Azure SQL DB

Kenneth.Fisher from SQLStudies

Creating a user is simple right? Yes and no. First of all, at least in SSMS it appears you don’t ... Continue reading

 

 Question of the Day

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

 

Valid Languages

What valid languages are allowed in SQL Server 2019 for sp_execute_external_script?

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

 

 

 Yesterday's Question of the Day (by BTylerWhite)

Decoding ROT13 in Python

I'm working with an encoded string in Python. I know I can use the "codecs" module to decode an encoded object by providing the appropriate codec. What will be the output of executing the following code?

import codecs

encoded_string = "FDYFreirePrageny"

decoded_string = codecs.decode(encoded_string, "rot13")

print(decoded_string)

Answer: SQLServerCentral

Explanation: ROT13 is a simple substitution cipher that rotates each character by 13 places. It's origins come from the times of Ancient Rome, as it is a special case of the Ceasar cipher. While the cipher does little from a security aspect, it makes for interesting use cases. Notably, this cipher is found in the "this" module related to The Zen of Python by Tim Peters. To get a better visual understanding of the character mapping rotations, we can run the following code:

for index, c in enumerate(range(65, 91), start=1):
    if index <= 13:
        print (index, c, chr(c), chr(c + 13))
    else:
        print (index, c, chr(c), chr(c - 13))

The "codecs" module provides access to the internal Python codec registry. Decoding the "FDYFreirePrageny" string using ROT13 reveals "SQLServerCentral". References:

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 - Development
Create DB List of latest Cumulative Updates - Hi. How can i webcrawl the internet to get the latest CU details and store them in a database. Instead of me tediously manually doing this, i want to automate it, is this possible? I can use either .net, jquery or can it be done in
Stored procedure that runs quickly in SSMS hangs up in SSRS - I'm attaching a WORD document that lists the T-SQL code in the stored procedure that runs in SSMS, but gets "stuck" in SSRS.  I don't see the problem.  Most of the stored procedures I write for my reports are similarly written with 1 or more #temp tables and I don't have problems with them.  Any […]
How do you convert a timestamp into a date - Hi all Can anyone help me turn a timestamp that looks like this: "1994-10-07 00:00:00.0000000" into "10-07-1994",  then into 10-94? I tried cast(DOB as date) and it came back as 1994-10-07.   Any assistance would be appreciated.  
SQL Server 2016 - Administration
Replication sending same change over and again when doing a batch update - Good morning, I recently set up replication on my sql server - Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (SP2) (KB4052908) - 13.0.5026.0 (X64) Mar 18 2018 09:11:49 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation Developer Edition (64-bit) on Windows Server 2016 Standard 10.0 (Build 14393: ) (Hypervisor) going via AWS DMS, which is then sending the data to a […]
Fragmentation & Statistics - Hi All Was approached with a slow running query. First thing I did was update statistics on the entire DB which improved the performance drastically. The problem is that the performance starts to degrade after about an hour or so at which point I update stats again - I've set up a job to update […]
Sql error log - We have job which is configured to recycle the sql error log on daily basis and its failing with the error DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator. [SQLSTATE 01000] (Message 2528) SQLServerAgent Error: 32. [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 22022). The step failed. we renamed the sql error log out file […]
Development - SQL Server 2014
Can I use UNPIVOT - Hi I have a table which I would like to turn columns into rows. create table Customer ( CID int not null, WholeSaler bit not null, ReSaler bit not null, Retail bit not null ) insert into Customer values (1, 0,0,1), (2, 1,1,1), (3, 1,0,0) I would like to get this output CID CustType 1 […]
Table Alerts - I would like to build something as described below. An Insurancetable which has InsurerName, PhoneNumber, InsureAmount and InsureRenewalDateTime I would like to send reminder text messages to Insurer phones everytime they are due on their Insurance at EXACTLY the datetime they are due. What is the best possible way to achieve this from the database […]
How to reduce lock or avoid lock while encoding SQL statement - under active monitor, I found there was very amount of cumulative wait time(sec) for Lock,  now I want to know how many ways to reduce lock or avoid lock while encoding SQL statement, and if there is any way to reduce lock for the database or SQL server setting. many thanks!
Docusign API different UI - We have Apttus via which we use docusign and they use the classic UI of docusign. Now we have enabled embedded signing for certain users and when we invoke the docusign URL, the UI is of the new docusign which is not a consistent User experience. We are using the same account so wanted to […]
Addition of values from two fields - I have an inventory usage table that holds values for different locations and periods. The values are calculated by the ERP so I cannot change the SQL values, but in certain instances, I want to combine the values for two locations into one location and zero the usage for the original location. This would be […]
Azure Data Factory
Data masking using Azure Data Factory Data flows in Pipeline - Does any one have any good videos articles links to on how to do  Data masking of PII information while using ADF V2 though Data flow
Reporting Services
LookUp function weird issue - I AM experiencing a weird issue with the LookUp function. I have a list grouped by certain field. For example employees grouped by city. For each employee i have a columna of the list where i use the LookUp function yo retrieve more info from another dataset. So far everything works as expected. But i […]
? on Setting default value to Year of previous month - Hi, I know =Year(Today) will get me the current 4 digit year. What I need is the Year of the previous month. So if the report is run in January 2021, then the default value is 2020, if it is run in December of 2020, then its 2020   Thanks  
Suggestions
Adjust Canonical url to point to original article - I post on here via my RSS feed. In reviewing the source for the page I noticed the canonical URL is set to the SQLserverCentral website. The canonical URL pointing to my original post is how Google analytics lets me know how many views I've had. Only recently learned about this because Dev.to allows that […]
 

 

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