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Featured Contents

Question of the Day

Combining Python Lists

The Voice of the DBA

Daily Coping Tip

Set a goal to do something important to you in the next year.

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.

Agree or Lose Features

This is a new one. WhatsApp will start to deactivate features if you don't agree to their new privacy policy. This is the policy that notes they will share some information with their parent company, Facebook. You can save your data if you don't agree, but not forever. You'll have a time limit when they delete inactive accounts.

That's one way to ensure you can make changes to your policies. If users can't access some features, they are likely to agree. Or they might leave the platform, but switching a communication platform is hard if the people you communicate with won't move with you.

I use WhatsApp often when I'm overseas, as people in other countries seem to like it. One of my kids also likes it, so I can send him message or make calls when traveling. I have other methods, but there are certainly some people who I only communicate with on Whatsapp, so I'll likely be agreeing to the new policy.

I do, however, understand people who are concerned about Facebook and privacy and more. I certainly am careful about what "data" I put on Facebook, and I expect anything I do could potentially be lost, so I'm not as honest as I might otherwise be.

This is potentially, however, a disturbing new technique for getting customers to agree with changes to a EULA that you might want to make. While many US companies just change them whenever they want, some regulations require opt-in of certain items. If a company thinks customers might not want to agree, and they start turning off features, this can put pressure on customers, especially those that might not have easily migrate. This is one thing for Whatsapp, but this could potentially be a more disturbing issue for COTS software your business uses. Switching platforms is difficult and expensive.

If we had more open standards for most data and software, this might be less of an issue. This would allow more competition among vendors, and force them to pay attention to security, quality, and privacy. If they didn't, changing software might be much easier for many organizations.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

Featured Contents

List Azure SQL Database Read and Write Permissions

Pablo Echeverria from SQLServerCentral

List Azure SQL Database read write permissions

Save the date: PASS Data Community Summit 2021

Additional Articles from Redgate

Simple Talk editor Kathi Kellenberger announces this year's free global online conference will take place on November 8 - 12. Save the date, and stay tuned for the Call for Speakers coming soon.

Creating Deep and Shallow Delta Clones in Azure Databricks

Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com

In this article we will look at how to create deep and shallow clones of source data when using Azure Databricks.

You are cordially invited to attend 2021 Virtual Data.SQL.Saturday.LA event!

Press Release from SQLServerCentral

We are reaching out to all people that enjoyed SQL Saturday in LA 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 events to let you know that the 2021 event is fast approaching. Only 30+ days remain until the June 12 Virtual Data.SQL.Saturday.LA event. Please register soon to reserve your spot by using http://2021sqlsatla.eventbrite.com/ hyperlink, register using a form below or just use a QR code.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Creating a generic (template) pipeline in Azure Data Factory to send email messages with attached files from Azure Storage account

Rayis Imayev from Data Adventures

(2021-May-17) It took some time to come up with a final title for this blog post in my attempt to encapsulate its several major ideas: Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipeline,...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - What’s new with Power BI?

James Serra from James Serra's Blog

At the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2021, a ton of new features for Power BI where announced. Below is my list of top ten new features, but there were...

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Combining Python Lists
I have this code: a = [1, 3] b = [2, 4] c = [(x,y) for x in a for y in b] # nested iterators print(c) What gets printed?
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)

The DEFAULT RANGE

If not specified in an OVER clause, what is the default RANGE framing?

Answer: RANGE UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW

Explanation: The default is RANGE UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW. Ref: OVER() Clause - https://docs.microsoft.com/sql/t-sql/queries/select-over-clause-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15

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

Moving Listener and Cluster AD objects - Hi our Ad administrator wants to move all the listener and SQL cluster objects into their own OU, even for live production servers. I'm fine with that but can anyone confirm whether moving the AD object will have an impact on the SQL servers. My gut says no it won't but they're production servers Cheers […]

Account the SQL service is Locked - Good morning all , Does the fact that the Active directory account for starting the SQL service is locked does this cause problems with the functioning of SQL server thanks

Find rogue process updating statistics - I have a 3rd party app and DB that requires all stats be updated using full scan, 100% sample rates. I have a maintenance plan to do this every weekend, but have found that something is erasing my work by updating stats with a small sample, less than 1% on tables with 100+ million records. […]

SQL Server 2017 - Development

Parse a very large delimited string - Trying to parse a very basic table with 2 colums, and ~9,000 rows. Columns are ID and delimited_string. ID is a varchar (50), and delimited_string is a varchar (max). The max len of the delimited_string is 313,895 characters. The delimiter is a semi-colon. I've tried a bunch of different methods, but can't get the query […]

Updating schema reference automatically in stored Procedures - Requirement: Need to copy all objects (tables, fn, stored Procedures) from default dbo schema to new schema. This new schema is created programmatically on user action from the front end. Problem: Copying the objects is straightforward for tables. For stored procedures and functions also it is not too bad to make a copy. My issue […]

Generate scripts of creating multiple external tables - Hello, we are creating prod environment and need create multiple external tables (in Azure SQL) in PROD. How can I generate the script of creating external tables at once in lower environment? instead of clicking 'Scripts table as' one by one. Thanks in advance.

SQL Server 2016 - Administration

TDE Understanding - Hi All I hope to get some clarity on a TDE configuration I am working on. I have multiple PROD servers and 1 QA server where we restore PROD to on a regular basis. Each server will have its own master key obviously and its own certificate. Question - Does one server certificate service all […]

SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

SQL Agent job TIME token - leading zeroes removed - I'm using "$(ESCAPE_NONE(DATE))$(ESCAPE_NONE(TIME))" in a job step which, according to the documentation, is supposed to be the date in YYMMDD format and the time in HHMMSS format. However, the stored procedure I'm running (which has a VARCHAR parameter) is getting: YYYYMMDDHHMMSS - when the hour is between 10 and 23 YYYYMMDDHMMSS - when the hour […]

SQL 2012 - General

How to find two latest prices for each ItemNo using SQL query - I have two tables: OrderItems tabel OrderId OrderDate ItemNo ItemDescrepation Unit Price 1001 03-15-2020 91570 Charger 12V $50 1205 05-06-2020 91570 Charger 12V […]

SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL

Performance issue (e.g. top 60000 takes 1000x longer than top 50000 on insert) - Hi all Short version: USE StagingDBtemp -- new empty database with same design as StagingDB created for no reason other than troubleshooting this IDENTITY INSERT Incoming ON INSERT INTO Incoming (ID, DataField1, DataField2) SELECT TOP 60000 ID, DataField1, DataField2 FROM StagingDB..Incoming -- note: ID is auto-incrementing INT and PK and there are no other indexes […]

SQL Server 2019 - Administration

Database Usage by Login Account - I would like to see which accounts in SQL are actively using databases. When I look at results from a trace file, I can see individual users, who do not have specific permissions. For example, I see that "MyDomain\Joe_Smith" accessed "Sales_DB". although Joe_Smith doesn't have SQL permissions. I suspect they are in an Active Directory […]

Reporting Services

? on changing option on Web interface - Hi, I would like Basic users to see just the "View" and "search" options, but admins to see all Any ideas? Thx

SSRS 2016

Can Case be used to assign filter with =, = - When writing a SQL query, I want to have a parameter (say, Return) which will have the following values (the parenthesis text is what the end user sees, not the values): A (Budget) B (Actual) C (Encumbrance) D (Actual & Encumbrance) In my dataset, the Tranact_Type are: 1 for Actual 4 for Encumbrance 5 for […]

Integration Services

Package status = Succeeded despite errors - I have a package with an OnError event handler which records the failure in a database table. This is all working fine but looking at the "All Executions" report, the status is "Succeeded". This has the effect that the SQL Agent job which runs the package is also succeeding. Consequently no failure notification is raised […]

The SQL connection password is not saved after deployed to the server - I developed an SSIS package in Visual Studio 2019 and deployed it to SQL Server 2017. The package contains a SQL DB connection using Microsoft OLE DB Driver for SQL Server. It worked fine until today when I updated the package with an email address change, then deployed it back to the server. When executed […]

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