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Day: September 28, 2022

Understanding CCPA

Published 2022-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Anas Baig provides a primer on the California Consumer Privacy Act:

While the GDPR has some of the most crushing requirements, such as the brief 12-hour window to report a breach, CCPA takes a broader view. It goes even further to locate and protect what constitutes personal or private data as per the GDPR. 

The primary difference between the two is that GDPR is more about prior consent, while CCPA is about opting out. GDPR binds businesses to ask for consent before having a consumer’s data stored and processed. On the other hand, CCPA requires businesses to enable consumers to opt-out at any point. 

It allows consumers to access every piece of personal information saved and a complete list of third parties it is shared with. Moreover, consumers have the right to sue a company for violating privacy guidelines even if there has been no breach.

Considering how much we heard about GDPR, I’m surprised there’s been so little about CCPA.

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Search on Windows with Everything

Published 2022-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Zika reviews a product:

Not everything in the general sense, but a tool called Everything by voidtools (Download link). Usually, I have to make this distinction when googling.

No matter how great is my folder structure or naming conventions, there comes a time when I have trouble locating something.
Maybe the software has a default download location which I forgot (*cough* Teams *cough*), or I want to find an install folder, or I can’t locate a picture I’ve recently saved.

Read on to learn a bit more about the free tool. After Tom’s recommendation, I gave it a try and yeah, it’s fast.

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In-Place SQL Server Upgrades

Published 2022-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley rolls the dice:

In my experience, two options exist to get the desired result. One, create a new server, install the latest supported version of SQL Server, and migrate your data. Two, upgrade SQL Server on the existing server.

There are pros and cons to each of these options. My preference is to go with option number one as it allows you more flexibility in your migration plan. However, many smaller shops might not have the hardware resources for this option, so they are forced to option number two.

In-place upgrades have improved considerably, though certain ancillary services (like Machine Learning Services) have breaking changes between versions, so you may be forced into the first route regardless.

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MERGE in Dedicated SQL Pools

Published 2022-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Emily Tehrani notes an addition to Azure Synapse Analytics:

We are thrilled to announce that the MERGE T-SQL command for Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL pools is now Generally Available! MERGE has been a highly requested addition to the Synapse T-SQL library that encapsulates INSERTs/UPDATEs/DELETEs into a single statement, drastically easing migrations and making table synchronization a breeze.

If you do decide to use this, I’d expect it to have the same bugs which make its use on-premises a mess. As always, MERGE responsibly.

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Azure SQL MI Error Loading Backup Retention Policies

Published 2022-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Paloma Garcia Martin troubleshoots an error:

When you try to create a new database (*) using Azure Portal using non supported characters, you will see an error indicating characters that you cannot use on the database name.

But if you use SSMS tool, it doesn’t include these characters cheeking and it will not avoid you to use these non-supported characters on the database name. 

Click through for an example of this error in action.

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Pagination in SQL Server

Published 2022-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan is paging us:

Pagination (or paging) is the process used to return a set of results in pages. When it comes to pagination in SQL Server, you have a couple of different options. Today, we’ll look at three of them. The first being pagination with the use of FETCH/OFFSET, the second using a CTE, and the third with the use of ROW_NUMBER. Let’s look at a brief example of how each works.

For each example, I’m using @PageSize to determine how many results to return and @PageNumber to determine what page of results to return from the StackOverflow2013 database.

Chad has three techniques listed here. Pagination is one of those things which should be simple but all of the simple options have major performance drawbacks once you get to datasets whose sizes require pagination.

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SQL Server on Windows 11 WSL

Published 2022-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski provides an update on SQL Server running on Windows Subsystem for Linux:

This happens because up until now, WSL did not support systemd. However recently Microsoft announced systemd support for WSL here: –
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-is-now-available-in-wsl/

This is pretty cool and gives us another option for running SQL Server locally on linux (great for testing and getting to grips with the Linux platform).

So how can we get this up and running?

Read on for instructions, as well as a couple pitfalls Andrew ran into along the way.

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