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

Data Privacy Grows in California

A few years ago the CCPA passed in California. This was the first large scale effort in the US to provide some legislative action on data privacy in the wake of the GDPR taking effect in the EU. While there have been some actions under the CCPA, it didn't seem to have as much of an affect on how data is managed as the GDPR did.

However, in November 2020, the citizens of California passed Proposition 24, which was seen as a CCPA 2.0. This expands data privacy laws and allows consumers to direct businesses not to share their information.

To me, this is a good trend in that consumers want more say in how businesses use their data. Unlike a law passed by a legislature, consumers would have to amend this in another vote. This places a greater burden on businesses, both to handle data more carefully, but also to ensure more cybersecurity. I think this just requires business to stop giving lip services to these items and actually back up what they claim they want to do.

I also like that consumers have new rights, which is important. I've been dealing with the GDPR at Redgate Software for a few years and this hasn't been overly burdensome to many businesses. It is work, but often many companies have played fast and loose with consumer data in the past, and now they need to respect their customers' rights more.

I wish this type of regulation were in place across the entire US, and I hope it becomes a focus in the future. While this can raise some costs, it also requires good practices for data handling and security, something that most of us want from every company. If you need to use data, protect it.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

Is Tempdb Causing a Bottleneck?

One of your SQL Server instance shows a major dip in performance or throughput, affecting all the user databases. You notice that the slow interludes coincide, as if orchestrated. On investigation, it appears that several transactions running over that period were using a lot of space in tempdb. However, which of them, if any, are causing the tempdb bottleneck, and why?

AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services

AI could make healthcare fairer—by helping us believe what patients say

In the last few years, research has shown that dee...

Administration of SQL Server

Moving SQL Server Table to Different Filegroup

Total: 1 Average: 5Introduction A table is a logic...

Performance of sys.partitions

Aaron Bertrand investigates what makes sys.partiti...

Server Review Essentials for Accidental and Junior DBAs—Setting Up (Part 1)

Welcome to a new year, and a new look at what I’...

Storage Tiers What SQL Server DBAs Need to Know

“One Gerbil, Two Gerbils or Three Gerbils?” is...

Search SQL Server error log files

The SQL Server error log is helpful for troublesho...

An Important Difference Between Change Tracking And Change Data Capture

Overload Sometimes documentation is overwhelming, ...

What SQL Server Feature Do You Wish Would Go Away?

I asked a two-part question on Twitter: if you cou...

Azure CosmosDB

AzureCosmosR: interface to Azure Cosmos DB

by Hong Ooi Last week, I announced AzureCosmosR, an R interface to Azure Cosmos DB, a fully-managed NoSQL database service in Azure. This post gives a short rundown on...

Azure Databricks, Spark and Snowflake

How Interchangeable Are Delta Tables Between Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics?

Databricks vs Synapse Analytics As an architect I often get challenged by customers on different approach’s to a data transformation solutions, mainly because they are concerned about locking themselves...

How to get data in a DataFrame via .NET for Apache Spark

When I first started working with Apache Spark, one of the things I struggled with was that I would have some variable or data in my code that I...

Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL vCore vs DTU

If you are building database solutions in Azure , ...

Azure Synapse (SQL Data Warehouse and Data Lake)

Automatic pause all Synapse Pools and keeping your subscription costs under control

As Synapse engineer or Synapse Support Engineer you may need to start and test some Pools, and you want this to be the most cost efficient possible. Leaving some Synapse with a lot of DWU left turned on during the weekend because you forget to pause the DW after you shutdown your computers is not a good approach and we can quickly resolve this by using Powershell + Automation accounts.

Community Interests

[Coping] Hidden Wounds

Through high school and college, I carried deep wounds due to what was going on at home. Only a handful of people outside of my family knew what what... The...

Platforms for Events

in my last post I wrote about thinking of the tool...

The End of PASS

I think our profession was the better for having a professional association, even if it never quite did as much as I wanted it to. I put a lot... The...

Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google, AWS)

Azure Cloud Shell–Do You Use It?

One of the challenges of being a consultant is hav...

Create an S3 Lifecycle Policy with PowerShell

First, I’m a big believer in doing infrastructur...

Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars

The Future of Database DevOps

Join Pramod Sadalage, Director at Thoughtworks, and a stellar line up of speakers for Redgate Summit: The Future of Database DevOps on February 17 & 18. You’ll discover the latest trends in DevOps, brand new insights from the 2021 State of Database DevOps report, an introduction and technical demos of Redgate’s solutions for Database DevOps, and more.

DMO/SMO/Powershell

Renaming Files by Padding Numbers with PowerShell

Some time ago I had downloaded all the SQL Saturday XML files. I’ve been meaning to flatten those into a database, but that project keeps getting away from me.... The...

Data Privacy, Compliance, and GDPR

California’s Proposition 24 Confirms the Fate of Data Privacy

Click to learn more about author Kyle McNabb. The ...

Data Visualisation

Beware of data shared via social media - get the facts

Editor's note: This blog post is part of a series of posts, originally published here by our partner News Literacy Project, exploring the role of data in understanding our world. Like infographics, social...

a multitude of makeovers

Submissions from Dec 2020 SWDchallenge: critique, then re-create Recently, SWD has had makeovers on the brain. We launched a new...

Drive action with your graphs

Welcome back to our journey of five questions to ask yourself when designing a graph for explanatory purposes. So far, we’ve addressed three of the five: decluttering, intentional use of color and, in yesterday’s post how different graphs enable us to see different things:

Database Design, Theory and Development

Calendar / Date Tables – An Introduction

What is a Calendar or Date table? Maybe you’ve w...

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Why Is It Such a Challenge to Integrate Security into DevOps?

Click to learn more about author Anastasios Arampatzis. DevOps is transforming how organizations develop software faster. DevOps utilizes agile methodologies to integrate and streamline the software development and operations...

ETL/SSIS/Azure Data Factory/Biml

Logical crossroads in Azure Data Factory (IF and Filter operations)

(2021-Jan-19) I was raised listening and reading ...

Q & A: Learning ETL. Where Should I Focus?

A viewer on my YouTube channel asked, “Never been too deep into SSIS, but the new role I’ll be taking on involves ETL, should I be focusing on Azure...

Two methods of deployment Azure Data Factory

Azure Data Factory is a fantastic tool which allow...

General

Windows 10 bug corrupts your hard drive on seeing this file's icon

An unpatched zero-day in Microsoft Windows 10 allows attackers to corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive with a one-line command.

How Table Partitioning in SQL Server Improves Query Performance (Explained in Legos)

Are your very large SQL Server Enterprise database tables causing slow query performance? I have been able to successfully use table partitioning to improve query performance by up to 75% for some Clients. Here is how it works.

Hardware

ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI Announced: A Motherboard for AMD Threadripper Pro

In the world of crazy motherboard names, I think A...

MDX/DAX

Introducing DEFINE COLUMN in DAX queries

This article describes the syntax and the use cases of the DEFINE COLUMN statement in DAX. Introduced in December 2020, the DEFINE COLUMN statement lets you define a calculated...

Microsoft News

Microsoft invests in $30 billion driverless car company Cruise

Investment pits Microsoft against Google sibling W...

Oracle

Oracle archived redo size – the research

Oracle archived redo size may be smaller than that of online redo log files. In this article, Jonathan Lewis takes a deeper look.

Performance Tuning SQL Server

Foreign Keys Falling Short

Short and Lousy This is one of the most frustrating things I’ve seen from the optimizer in quite a while. Here are a couple tables, with a foreign key...

Query Hints You Can Use to Avoid Blocking

No, not NOLOCK. You get the wrong query results, even when your query results aren’t supposed to be changing. I’m talking about when you need to do writes, but...

Concatenation

Introduction The Concatenation operator reads and ...

Normalizing To Reduce Blocking

Chalky I see a lot of tables that look something like this: CREATE TABLE dbo.orders ( order_id int NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT (NEXT VALUE FOR dbo.order_id), order_date datetime...

When do Statistics get updated?

Statistics objects are important for allowing the SQL Server Optimizer to make good estimates and form efficient execution plans. Related to that it's useful for us to understand when... The...

PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI

How to stop your Power BI tenant becoming a dataset swamp?

Self-service BI! This is what Power BI is all abou...

Shaping vs Modelling in Power BI

Level: Beginners The objective of this article is to help you understand the differences between shaping your data (using Power Query) and modelling your data (using the modelling tools...

Doing Power BI the Right Way: 4. Power Query in Dataflows or Power BI Desktop

Part of the the series: Doing Power BI the Right Way Power BI, more that any other Microsoft product in my recollection, offers more options and choices to architect and...

Do I need to be an expert in Power Query M?

Maybe you've heard of Power Query M in Microsoft E...

Create your first Power BI report

New to Power BI? Adam helps you get started with c...

New features in Power BI for Data Analysts – Small multiples, Anomaly Detection and Zoom on visuals

Great new features have bundled and are now available in Power BI. With December 2020 update, all of the features described in this blog post will be available. Once...

Power BI: Making Date & Time Keys

Saving the Day from Delay Part 2 Creating DateKey and TimeKey columns can be done with built in functions in the Power Query editor. Quick call out, if you...

Product Reviews and Articles

Managing database changes using Flyway: an Overview

This article describes the principles of using Flyway migrations to build a database from scripts, to a specified version, and to track, manage and apply all database changes. The post...

Is Tempdb Causing a Bottleneck?

One of your SQL Server instance shows a major dip in performance or throughput, affecting all the user databases. You notice that the slow interludes coincide, as if orchestrated....

Product Upgrades and Releases

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for January 2021

You know how a lot of app release notes say “bug...

Python

How to visualize complex sets intersections with Python?

Are you interested in guest posting? Publish at Da...

R Language

Why Gradient Descent Works (and How To Animate 3D-Functions in R)

The workhorse of Machine Learning is Gradient Descent. If you want to understand how and why it works and, along the way, want to learn how to plot and animate 3D-functions in R read on!

Create Return Triangle Plots with R

How lucrative stocks are in the long run is not on...

SQL Server Security and Auditing

What is the CONTROL permission?

One of the most powerful permissions available in ...

Security News and Issues

Chrome and Edge want to help with that password problem of yours

The line between browsers and password managers is blurring.

Security firm Malwarebytes was infected by same hackers who hit SolarWinds

Group backed by a nation-state rifles through comp...

SVR Attacks on Microsoft 365

FireEye is reporting the current known tactics that the SVR used to compromise Microsoft 365 cloud data as part of its SolarWinds operation: Mandiant has observed UNC2452 and other threat...

What Can Enterprises Do After a Ransomware Attack?

Click to learn more about author Evelyn Johnson. There were 199.7 million ransomware attacks in just the last four months. That’s nearly 25 attacks per second. The recent surge...

T-SQL

Checking job history log size with TSQL

One of the important settings on SQL Server is the job history log size and the maximum rows per job. Without these set accurately you may not be able...

Tech News

Wi-Fi 6E arrives at CES 2021

We round up the Wi-FI 6E routers, with Asus' model...

How one musician took on the world’s biggest TV network over copyright—and won

“The torrent they got the music from was just ca...

CentOS is gone—but RHEL is now free for up to 16 production servers

RHEL is now free for dev teams, and it's even free...

Ars online IT roundtable: What’s the future of the data center?

Join Sean Gallagher, Dell's Ivan Nekrasov, and me today, January 21, at 3:15pm Eastern!

The Lighter Side

Falcon 9 rocket launches, lands for the eighth time in dicey winds [Updated]

Weather appears to be good for Wednesday after con...

After a decade, NASA’s big rocket fails its first real test

"It's not everything we hoped it would be."

Toyota wants to win Le Mans with its new GR010 hybrid prototype

The 670hp GR010 is the first of the new Le Mans Hypercars to break cover.

 
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