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Day: March 25, 2022

Homoglyphs and Code Oddities

Published 2022-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Harrison explains how homoglyphs can cause potential issues:

This article will walk through homoglyphs and a proposed type of attack that I have not yet seen in the wild, but I presume has occurred. Every programming language I’m aware of is impacted but I don’t know every programming language, so I’ll stick to PowerShell for the proofs of concepts below. I’ll also show code that I wrote to detect this vulnerability in PowerShell code which can be built upon to create scanners for other languages. The problems I present here can be detected if proper unit testing is in place. I don’t like writing unit tests either, but this is me Pestering you to consider adding unit testing to your pipeline.

Homoglyphs can definitely make it harder to perform code reviews and analyses, particularly when dealing with a malicious actor.

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Finding the Distribution of Cached Plan Ages

Published 2022-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Tibor Karaszi thinks about plan ages:

So what if your oldest plan is 3 only days old? Or 3 hours? Or 3 minutes?

Finding your most expensive queries based on such short “tail” is pretty meaningless and you end up wasting time tuning a set of queries that in the end wasn’t the most important ones, after all.

This isn’t necessarily something we always think about but Tibor makes a great point here.

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Power BI Hybrid Table Q&A

Published 2022-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam Watson shares some questions and answers:

Are Hybrid Tables tied to a developer license type?

No. Incremental Refresh and Hybrid tables are tied to workspace (dataset) type. They are set up in Power BI Desktop. A developer must have Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license to publish the report to the service. See the next two paragraphs for workspace (dataset) limitations.

Click through for the FAQs and answers.

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SQL Server and Daylight Savings Time

Published 2022-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Pollock has to turn the clocks forward:

At the start of Daylight Saving Time (DST), which is this weekend in the UK, the clocks will move forward by one hour at 1am. Apart from the fact that we all lose an hour of our night’s sleep, what effect will this have on your scheduled jobs in SQL Server?

As we saw in my last blog post, we know that the SQL Server engine always carries on regardless of when the clocks change, it knows that this has happened, but nothing unusual occurs in the engine itself. However, SQL Server Agent, which runs scheduled tasks, is not the same, as this directly impacts how it works. 

Read on to see what can happen. Also, this can be relevant when you have unique key constraints on datetime values.

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