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Database Weekly
The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News
Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge
Editorial
 

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays!

Happy Kwanza!

Merry Christmas!

Happy Hanukkah!

Happy Yuletide!

Happy New Year!

Personally, I love this time of year. I like the music, the decorations, pretty much the whole thing. Plus, at my house, we watch Christmas movies. However, we go out of our way to find the Christmas movies that are a little off. Ok, maybe more than a little off. Sure, we watch Miracle on 34th Street (the one with Natalie Wood & Maureen O’Hara, accept no substitutes), but we also watch The Thin Man (yet another Maureen). A decidedly child un-friendly film that has become a holiday stable is Rare Exports. Great film. Another odd one, again, not entirely child appropriate, is Long Kiss Goodnight. There are a few others. It’s just a fun way to mix things up and toss in some additional, albeit twisted, whimsy to a whimsical time of year.

I hope you have some unique bit of fun or entertainment that you get up to at this time of year. Share it in the comments.

If you’re having a rough time this season, as many are, please, don’t hesitate to reach out. Maybe watch a Christmas film. Die Hard is a great one.

Grant Fritchey

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

What’s most important to you when dealing with database software?

Take part in this short exercise (no more than 5 minutes) by letting us know what matters most to you when considering, purchasing, or using database software. As a thank you, you can also enter our prize draw at the end for a chance to win a $150 Amazon gift voucher.

AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services

Talking Human: Text Analytics in Cognitive Services

The ability of computers to process tabular and numeric data is unequivocally an essential part of industries today. However, while being able to process massive amounts of numeric data...

It’s Time for Public Sector Standards On AI

Click here to learn more about Golnar Pooya. The benefits offered by artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector are nothing short of revolutionary. Algorithms powered by machine learning...

Administration

Introduction to SQL Server Query Store

Introduced with SQL 2016, Query Store was, probably without doubt, the most anticipated and talked out new feature. In this post we'll just take a brief look at it,... The...

Azure Databricks, Spark and Snowflake

Advent of 2020, Day 18 – Using Azure Data Factory with Azure Databricks

Series of Azure Databricks posts: Dec 01: What is Azure Databricks Dec 02: How to get started with Azure Databricks Dec 03: Getting to know the workspace and Azure Databricks platform Dec 04: Creating...

Advent of 2020, Day 16 – Databricks experiments, models and MLFlow

Series of Azure Databricks posts: Dec 01: What is Azure Databricks Dec 02: How to get started with Azure Databricks Dec 03: Getting to know the workspace and Azure Databricks platform Dec 04: Creating...

Advent of 2020, Day 14 – From configuration to execution of Databricks jobs

Series of Azure Databricks posts: Dec 01: What is Azure Databricks Dec 02: How to get started with Azure Databricks Dec 03: Getting to know the workspace and Azure Databricks platform Dec 04: Creating...

Career Growth and Certifications

Speaker Guidance: Save Your Data

The PASS organization (and likely SQL Saturday) are shutting down their sites on 15 Jan,  2021. This means that potentially lots of links and data will disappear. There are... The...

The path beyond skills maps

We’ve already shared our reflections on seven years with skills maps, and our realization that we needed something more.

[Video] Office Hours: SQL Server Career Q&A, Part 1

I posted a call for questions about SQL Server careers and professional development, and y’all asked a lot of good ones. Here were the questions you upvoted the most,...

How Universities and Tech Vendors Can Collaborate for the Future of Work

Click to learn more about author Tom Clancy. Over the last six months, the pandemic has dramatically changed the way we live and work – forcing organizations to turn...

Community Interests and PASS

The End of the Professional Association for SQL Server #SQLPASS

This afternoon, PASS announced that their operations will cease in January: We are saddened to tell you that, due to the impact of COVID-19, PASS is ceasing all regular...

ASF 035: Alex Yates interview (part 2)

Introduction Alex is a Data Platform MVP who loves...

SQLSaturday is dead, long live DataSaturdays

This is a very brief post to inform you that PASS has died, killed by the for-profit company behind it. That’s sad beyond words, but we, as a community,... The...

Announcing the Calgary Data User Group

In 2018 I started a new user group called the Calgary Data User Group, and hosted one session called “The Ethics of Machine Learning.” It was well-attended and its...

A year of giving back at Redgate

This year has been difficult for most of us, and it’s almost over. The lives of people throughout the world have been turned upside down. Many of us, myself...

Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars

Upcoming Events: Data Platform Meetup Israel

Key Details What: Data Platform Meetup Israel.Where: On the Internet, UTC+2.When: Monday, December 21st.Admission is free. RSVP on Meetup. What I’m Presenting 1:00 PM — 2:30 PM EST —...

DMO/SMO/Powershell

Creating and Setting SQL Server Certificates with PowerShell

I recently had a need to add certificates to SQL S...

Data Mining / Data Analysis

FDA releases data on Moderna’s COVID vaccine: It looks good [Updated]

Data drop comes ahead of a potential Emergency Use Authorization on Thursday.

Data Privacy, Compliance, and GDPR

A quick guide to the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 for DBAs

December 1 saw the introduction in New Zealand of the Privacy Act 2020 which not only brings increased protection for individuals but also has some new implications for businesses,...

Data Science

Introduction to Data Science at Trainline

Introduction to data science at Trainline Hello an...

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Automating Python Data Pipelines with SQL Agent

The popularity of Python continues to grow and grow as days go on. As companies begin to adopt cloud first approaches and the move to the Modern Data Warehouse, it’s important that as BI Developers, we are working towards building our skillsets to be ready for when the company gives the greenlight for the cloud. The problem with this is how to learn the skills for the cloud if these skills to work in the cloud are lacking.

Improving Data Pipelines with DataOps

Click to learn more about author Joe DosSantos. It was only a few years ago that BI and data experts excitedly claimed that petabytes of unstructured data could be...

Challenges to Database DevOps: How Do You Maintain Master Data?

When it comes to deploying databases, one of many challenges that arises is dealing with your master data, lookup data, or sometimes even reference data. It’s those tables that...

ETL/SSIS/Azure Data Factory/Biml

ADF Switch Activity – A neat solution for nested IFs.

Whilst carrying out some work for a client using Azure Data Factory I was presented with the challenge of triggering different activities depending on the result of a stored...

Hardware

Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q USB / Thunderbolt 3 Dual Mode External SSD Review: Yin and Yang

The external storage market has shown renewed vigor in recent years, thanks in part to growth fueled by bus-powered flash-based storage solutions. The introduction of 3D NAND, coupled with...

Performance Tuning SQL Server

A Suggestion To Make Lookups Less Painful

Odor Of Gas One problem with Lookups, aside from the usual complaints, is that the optimizer has no options for when the lookup happens. If the optimizer decides to use a nonclustered...

When Does UDF Inlining Kick In?

The Eye UPDATE: After writing this and finding the results fishy, I reported the behavior described below in “Somewhat Surprising” and “Reciprocal?” and it was confirmed a defect in SQL...

On table variable row estimations

At first glance, the question of how many rows are estimated from a table variable is easy. But, is it really that simple? Well, not really. To dig into... The...

Getting Started Reading Execution Plans: Highest Cost Operator

Reading execution plans in SQL Server is just hard. There’s a lot to learn and understand. I previously outlined the basics I use to get started when I’m looking...

Merge Interval

Introduction The Merge Interval operator reads dynamic seek range specifications, checks to see if their specified ranges overlap, and if so combines the overlapping ranges into one new range....

PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI

Answering your Power BI Premium Per User Questions

There were a lot of good questions on our Power BI...

Workout Wednesdays for Power BI in 2021

I’m excited to announce that something new is coming to the Power BI community in 2021: Workout Wednesday! Workout Wednesday started in the Tableau community and is expanding to... The...

Blend Power BI datasets with Excel files? INSANE AMAZING!

The moment you've been waiting for! What Marco Rus...

Capturing SQL Queries Generated By A Power BI DirectQuery Dataset

If you’re using DirectQuery mode for one or more tables in your Power BI dataset, the chances are that you will want to see the SQL (or whatever query...

Product Reviews and Articles

Using SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare within a PowerShell Cmdlet

SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare can be used together, from the command line, to provide a complete build process, or to script out changes to both the database...

Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches, 2nd Ed

This book, now in its second edition, aims to teach you Azure in around 20 hours, how does it fare?

Setting Defaults for New SQL Compare Projects

Recently I wrote about ignoring comments in SQL Compare. That seems like something I want to do in all my projects, so I went looking for how to set... The...

Product Upgrades and Releases

AWS CloudShell – Command-Line Access to AWS Resources

No matter how much automation you have built, no matter how great you are at practicing Infrastructure as Code (IAC), and no matter how successfully you have transitioned from...

Announcing Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (in Preview)

Today, in partnership with Grafana Labs, we are excited to announce in preview, Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG), a fully managed service that makes it easy to create...

R Language

Azure Functions with R and plumber

Azure Functions is a cloud service that allows you to deploy “serverless” microservices that are triggered by events (timers, HTTP POST events, etc) and automatically scale to serve demand...

Web Scraping for SQL Machine learning using R scripts

The web is a significant source of data in the digital era. All required information is available on the websites. For example, users can browse SQLShack for all useful SQL Server related articles. In the Power BI Desktop articles, we explored the way to fetch data directly from the URL.

Security News and Issues

More on the SolarWinds Breach

The New York Times has more details. About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update –­ a Trojan horse of sorts ­– that gave its hackers...

How the SolarWinds Hackers Bypassed Duo’s Multi-Factor Authentication

This is interesting: Toward the end of the second incident that Volexity worked involving Dark Halo, the actor was observed accessing the e-mail account of a user via OWA. This...

Software Development

Life of a Netflix Partner Engineer?—?The case of extra 40 ms

Life of a Netflix Partner Engineer?—?The case of...

T-SQL

Demystifying the coalesce function

What does coalesce mean? In the English language, it is generally used to convey a coming together, or creating one whole body, mass or system. How does that help us when working with data? We spend a lot of time cleaning our data, surely the last thing we want to do is lump it all together?

SQL Puzzle – Eight Queens on a Chess board

Here's a SQL Puzzle for the festive period. 2020 has been a year of many things but amongst it all, it has been the year of chess. The combined... The...

How to fix rounding errors

A number of business processes require you to distribute a value over a date range. However, if your distribution keys and values don't add up perfectly or aren't perfectly...

A Parameterization Puzzle With TOP Follow-Up

Spell It Out Back in October, I had written a couple posts about how parameterizing TOP can cause performance issues: A Parameterization Puzzle With TOP: Part 1 A Parameterization Puzzle With TOP:...

Avoiding Sorts with the $PARTITION Function

Backstory I imagine everybody has them – those annoying, bloated, misshapen tables that don’t really belong in the database. I mean, this is an expensive enterprise RDMS supporting a...

Tech News

EU warns that it may break up Big Tech companies

Repeat offenses under new rules will trigger action to force divestments.

The Lighter Side

Amazon’s answer to SpaceX Starlink delivers 400Mbps in prototype phase

Amazon offers peek into development of antenna for...

The kitchen of the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed

There’s a long-running column in Cook’s Illustrated called “What is it?” where we track down the origins of kitchen gadgets that our readers find in their attics or on...

We have a winner in the world’s first quantum chess tournament

It’s like playing in a multiverse “but the different boards are connected to each other.”

 
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