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Daily Coping Tip

Walk a different path outside today

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 Database Growth

The growth of the cloud is exploding overall, with all of the major vendors showing growing lots of revenue growth. Not all of them are profitable, but they are growing. This shows that customers want to use the cloud, and more of them are migrating all the time.

I do think that databases are likely migrated less than many other services, though their use is increasing. Plenty of organizations would like to offload some of the overhead of owning and managing hardware, which may be one reason why the growth of IaaS in the cloud is one of the more popular options.

For those databases that are being used in the cloud, can you guess which ones have the fastest growing usage? Since this is a primarily a SQL Server-based site, you might guess Azure SQL Database, and you'd be close. It's one of the fastest growing, edged out by PostgreSQL.  That's one reason we've been publishing some PostgreSQL articles; it's very popular and being used in many organizations that also have SQL Server.

While we know we can build cheaper systems on premises, and we can better control, or at least predict, performance, the cloud is attractive to many businesses. It's not perfect, but it is an option that you should be able to knowledgeably talk about when someone brings it up. That means you need to learn a bit about how it works, the costs, the performance, and the differences with an on-premises system.

You also might consider using VMs if someone wants to migrate to the cloud, as the system will appear to be very similar to the way your on-premises instance runs. The hardware setup is different, and you need to learn about the differences in how you connect disks and their performance.

Knowledge is important, and for many of us, we are looked at as those with knowledge about these different platforms and technologies. That means we need to spend some time learning, and likely a bit practicing to understand the impact so that we can present a good argument about when it may or may not be appropriate to use a cloud database.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

 
 Featured Contents
Stairway to Advanced T-SQL

Stairway to Advanced T-SQL Level 2: Using the APPLY Operator

Greg Larsen from SQLServerCentral.com

The APPLY operator allows you to join a record set with a function, and apply the function to every qualifying row of the table (or view). The APPLY operator takes on two formats: CROSS APPLY, or OUTER APPLY. This article will explain the differences between these two formats, and show you examples of how each of these formats work.

Insurance price prediction using Machine Learning (ML.NET)

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

In this article, Chandra Kudumula shows how to use ML.NET to train a model for predicting costs from an insurance dataset.

Finding Dependencies in SQL Server Databases using SQL Dependency Tracker

Additional Articles from Redgate

Before you alter a database object, you need to understand what other objects will be affected. This article shows how to generate a simple dependency diagram that reveals both those objects that reference the target object, and those referenced by it, and includes foreign key references, column references and all the other details you need.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Using Logic App to send multiple attachments from Azure Storage Account

Rayis Imayev from Data Adventures

(2021-Apr-23) Memory is an interesting thing, you may not remember all events from your past, but some sparking moments keep extending their bright beams of light. With the growing time...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Mental Health Day from the WIT Group

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from The Voice of the DBA

The pandemic of the last year has been a difficult time for many individuals and organizations. I know that I have had a number of ups and downs across...

 

 Question of the Day

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

 

Concatenate Strings in R

I want to use paste to concatenate a few strings like this: 
paste("can", "not")
However, I want to remove the space so that I get one word. What can I do?

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)

String Together ADF Strings

I have a flow in Azure Data Factory (ADF) in which I get a few strings from files and a lookup. I want to put these together to get a filename. What function should I use in place of the xxxx below?

xxxx(@string1, @string2, '.csv')

Answer: @concat

Explanation: The @concat function puts multiple strings together. Ref: @concat - https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/data-factory/control-flow-expression-language-functions#concat

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
Finding columns with null values - Hi, I have been using a code that someone else wrote to find which columns have null values. Since I have updated my management studio to 18, it is not longer working, not sure why. Instead of getting the columns I get Commands completed successfully. Completion time: 2021-04-26T15:24:39.7570119-04:00 Here is the code. declare @col varchar(255), […]
SQL Server 2016 - Administration
The most illustrative case for using EXTENDED EVENTS? - What would be a couple of things that I can do with Extended Events that I cannot do via Profiler Traces, DMVs, and/or QueryStore?  (Leaving aside the  lower XE's overhead/performance issues compared to svr side traces...). ANDOR a rephrased question: what kind of analysis/things to troubleshoot can I do with XE that I cannot do […]
Install SQL Server SP2 - Hello. On a Windows Server there are installed two SQL Server 2016 SP1 named instances. Can i install SP2 on one of them without to affect the other? Thank you.
SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL
Category Entry and Exit Dates per ID - Hello, I have the following table, where ID is the unique identifier. An can move from category to category, both up and down. My table records each day an ID stays in a given category. I am trying to identify the start date and the end date of an ID in a given category. The […]
Encryption String and SQL Server Jobs - Hello~ I am a developer of a DB Application (Azure SQL Server Back End/MS Access Front End), where we have recently encrypted several fields. We have a scheduled SQL Server Job, which has started hanging -- this job simply executes a VBS Script from the command line using 'cscript'.  This VBS Script connects to the […]
SQL Server 2019 - Administration
stop responding to queries of specific database - Hello I found a problem on my SQL Server instant, after 5-6 days the servers stop responding to queries of specific database and it won’t get fixe until I restart the service!   I checked the event logs, it says: " SQL Server was unable to run a new system task, either because there is […]
SQL Server 2019 - Development
Script to DROP and RE-CREATE all Primary and Foreign Key Constraints on all Tabl - Hi Does anyone know of a good way to Drop and Recreate all Primary and Foreign Key Constraints for all tables in a database please? Ive looked at various solutions but they dont seem to capture and recreate all the PK and FK constraints for all tables
Using CASE Statement with $Action in Output Clause in Merge - Hi there I want to write one combined Output statement at the end of a Merge statement to insert data into an action table, based on the action So I want to do something like Select $action case when $action = 'Update' then Output $Action, Deleted.* into #DeviceDataDelta case when $action = 'Insert' then Output […]
Sum of Rows - Hi Guys, How do i group the below code so it gives e a total duration for each person for each day. So for 07/08/2018 Dave Jones should show:     -- Sample data IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#lab') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #lab SELECT * INTO #lab FROM (VALUES ( '07/09/2018','Dave', 'Jones', '07/09/2018 09:56', 2301 ), […]
Simple SQL query - MOTEL (motelID, motelName, town) ROOM (roomID, motelNo, type, cost) BOOKING (motelNo, guestID, dateFrom, dateTo, roomID) GUEST (guestID, guestName, guestAddress)   For the above SQL database relation, I have two questions that I'm trying to answer: Select all guestIDs that have the person's first name as 'John', and have a booking with an undefined dateTo. No explicit or implicit […]
Problem with conversion from char to datetime - Hello everybody. I am trying to insert  some data in table  Production.WorkOrder. There are some data which type is datetime. I am trying to insert that type of data with CONVERT keyword. But when I run my query I get this.  What I need to do to solve this problem?    
Strategies and Ideas
Looking for suggestions on improving our "data warehouse" approach - I've come to find myself inheriting a loose "data warehouse" approach of sorts.  I'm quite new to data warehousing concepts, ETL, etc, but I have a feeling some of the things we're doing are less than optimal, so I'd appreciate any feedback on what we should be doing differently.  We're a low-to-mid size company that […]
Integration Services
The table name could not be retrieved from the script provided - I am having trouble moving data with ssis fromSQL Sever to Maria DB. When i run the following script, the table gets created in Maria DB. But no access to upload the data. Here is the error: "TITLE: Microsoft Visual Studio ------------------------------ The table name could not be retrieved from the script provided. Select a […]
SQL Server is changing the date format - Hi All, I am using VS 2017 to import data from excel to a SQL table, very basic no problems with loading the rows. The issue is I need the date format to be UK dd/mm/yyyy and SQL server keeps changing the formatting to US once it hits the table. The windows clock on the […]
TSQL To Maria DB - I am trying to load dat from TSQL Into Mysql/Maria DB. I get an aoutamic warning when trying to create the destination table about manually edit data types for destination table. I looked at the TSQL n Maria DB data types. I changed it from CREATE TABLE "ADO NET Destination" ( "uid" BIGINT, "order_uid" BIGINT, […]
 

 

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