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Daily Coping Tip

Decide to lift people up rather than put them down

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.

Bronze Age Development

This editorial was originally published on 21 Aug 2014. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

I was watching a presentation on testing recently where the speaker noted that on one project he'd spent twice as much time testing as coding. That sounds like an outrageous amount of time, but my concern was tempered when he said the release to production produced no bugs. I'm sure some bugs surfaced later, but I have often seen that most of the bugs, especially the incredibly annoying ones, are typically discovered quickly.

I was reminded of that presentation when I saw this quote: "...the result was a two-year development process in which only about four months would be spent writing new code. Twice as long would be spent fixing that code."

That's a quote on the development of Visual Studio a few years back. I wonder if the "twice as long fixing" time would have been reduced with better testing efforts earlier in development. It's hard to know since all evidence on the value of testing is based on disparate projects with different teams working at different levels of experience, but I've run into a few people that think more testing reduces overall development time.

The consultant who gave the presentation believes strongly in testing, not only at the application level, but also at the database level. This person has tried different levels of testing on different projects, and found that building and writing tests throughout development results in many fewer issues at release. Perhaps more telling is that when the person has performed less testing in later projects (because the clients declined to pay for it), there were more bugs in production.

I don't know if the total time spent on building software is less with testing occurring early than with allowing clients and customers to test and report bugs. Certainly some of that might depend on how many bugs you fix and how many bugs people must cope with, but I do know that the fewer issues people find with your software, the more excited they are to ask you to write more code in the future.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

 
 Featured Contents

How to Restore an Agent Job that was Dropped

Mikey Bronowski from SQLServerCentral

Once upon a time, you had one job, well actually two jobs. The first SQL Server agent job was important, the other was a test. You have decided you do not need the test agent job. Quick right-click on a job name, remove, confirm, done. When you refreshed the list, the test job was still […]

Database version control: Getting started with Flyway

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Flyway is a multi-platform, cross-database version control tool. Carlos Robles explains Flyway’s history and shows how it works.

Create Azure VM from a VHD image

Additional Articles from SQLServerCentral

Learn how to create an Azure VM image that can be used to quickly deploy new Azure VMs that are preconfigured based on your image settings.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Recovering Data from a Backup with SQL Data Compare

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from The Voice of the DBA

I had a customer recently ask about how to recover data from a backup file. I believe the request was for SQL Backup, but I knew there was another...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Data Lakehouse defined

James Serra from James Serra's Blog

As a follow-up to my blog Data Lakehouse & Synapse, I wanted to talk about the various definitions I am seeing about what a data lakehouse is, including a...

 

 Question of the Day

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

 

The Default Severity

I am using THROW in my application like this: 
THROW 51000, 'The record does not exist.', 1;
What severity level does this report to the user?

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)

Control Permission Limits

If I grant someone the CONTROL permission on a database object, can they then grant permissions to others to access the object?

Answer: Yes to all objects

Explanation: The CONTROL permission includes the ability to grant permissions to others. Ref: CONTROL - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/security/permissions-database-engine?view=sql-server-ver15#_conventions

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
Backup to AWS S3 - We backup over the weekend our full backups to a backup server with a large EBS volume. Once this is complete we have a second step to invoke a powershell script remotely on the backup server that uses Rclone to sync the backups to S3. Perhaps this is a daft idea - and I'd be […]
Multi subnet failover cluster - My goal is to have an FCI across 2 nodes with shared storage (node 1 & node 2) in primary data center on subnet1 and then 2 nodes  with shared storage(node 3 & node4) in secondary data center as subnet2. Node1 & Node2 are connected to subnet1 and Node 3 & Node 4 are connected […]
SQL Server 2017 - Development
Compare columns between 2 tables - Create TABLE #TableA ( TaskNameA nvarchar(100), GovernA bit, ToolTypeA nvarchar(10), ResourceNameA nvarchar(100) ) Create TABLE #TableB ( TaskNameB nvarchar(100), GovernB bit, ToolTypeB nvarchar(10), ResourceNameB nvarchar(100) ) INSERT INTO #TableA (TaskNameA,GovernA,ToolTypeA,ResourceNameA ) SELECT 'Gap Follow Up', 1 , 'Tool' ,'Regional/Local' UNION ALL SELECT 'Gap Extension', 1 , 'Excel' ,'Advanced Scoping' UNION ALL -- good SELECT 'Gap […]
SQL Server 2016 - Administration
Port 1433 does not have SSL certificate even after the necessary settings - Hi I have a clustered MS SQL server setup (2016, Enterprise, on AWS instance) with two nodes. I had configured SSL encryption on the two nodes using the guides provided by Microsoft as well as SQL tips. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/configure-windows/enable-encrypted-connections-to-the-database-engine?view=sql-server-ver15 https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3299/how-to-configure-ssl-encryption-in-sql-server/ Everything works absolutely fine. I've checked the SQL Server logs which shows the SSL certificate was […]
SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL
Error in bcp query out - I've been playing around wiht bcp out the data into csv file but been getting this error. I've a setup a table where I read the table name, servername, database name, filepath and build a dynamic query through stored procedure. But I've been getting below error and can't seem to figure out.  If anybody has […]
Administration - SQL Server 2014
Database Architecture - Hi Experts, Our architecture team come up with a new plan to have multiple databases for different microservices , that means for each project we will have a minimum of 3 databases only for the application, one for user management and another one for documents. As per them this is to make sure exclusive access […]
SQL Server 2019 - Administration
Opaque Encryption - with No Views, or Special SQL - Hi, I want to encrypt certain columns in various tables in a SQL Server 2019 database. I would like to do this, for five groups of users - or five roles. Some of these users actually use SSMS and run queries themselves, while others access data through interactive reports, and some link to the database […]
Assigning user to Azure Active Directory enterprise application via python SDK - I have added slack to Azure Active Directory Enterprise application and running SSO. I want to assign users and groups to the app in azure. So, basically, it is really easy to use portal. Also , I provided the PowerShell script as well. #AzureAD Module #Azure login : Connect-AzureAD $app_name ="slack" $app_role_name = "user" $user […]
Powershell script giving the error "The specified value 'Patch' is invalid." - I am trying to patch my SQL server with CU8 and GDR for SQL Server 2019 on a windows 2019 server There is only the default instance and when I run the following command in powershell as administrator I get the error below and the summary files are attached: setup.exe /updatesource="E:\SQL_2019\patches"  /Action=Patch /allinstances /IAcceptSQLServerLicenseTerms The funny […]
SQL Server 2019 - Development
Sequentially Adding Variable Number of Rows - I need to add a number rows together and I'm not sure how to do it. I have the following dataset. I want to add the previous rows together to get the following. Can this be done?  
Sql Joins ! - Hi There Im pretty new to SQL ..and best describe my queries at this stage as basic. I wonder if I could get some thoughts on an sql query that for some reason, the results are missing out some records from one of my join tables. I've added some left joins pulling in fields from […]
SQL Server 2008 - General
SQL Server Database availability - I'm looking for help in establishing an ODBC connection in Excel to an SQL Server database. I don't know too much about these connections and don't have any administrator privileges to make any changes with Server Management. Here is the background: We are using a software application that connects to the server database using SQL […]
Reporting Services
Unable to manage subscription. - I am working on troubleshooting an issue with the report server. I am able to view the report from the browser, however; when I am trying to manage the subscription, I get an error. This is error from the log file 'library!ReportServer_0-2!e2c!01/25/2021-12:46:38:: e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.ReportServerStorageException: , An error occurred within the report server database. […]
access registrykey from within SSRS report - I am trying to the code function to determine if a particular application is installed on the client machine with the intent that it would either result in one of two actions to occur.  in reading materials online, it appears that Microsoft.Win32.Registry or Microsoft.Win32 should have the access to the RegistryKey object so that I […]
Integration Services
ispac file association broken - I updated my visual studio 2019 professional recently, and when I try to double click an ispac file now to deploy, then it lost the file association. I tried to manually add the file association back as the isdeploymentwizard.exe again, but now when I open it, I get a window which suggests that it needs […]
 

 

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