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Day: April 24, 2025

Graphs are Not Always Necessary

Published 2025-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Velez drives home a point:

Our current #SWDchallenge has been on my mind. For those who don’t know, we pose a different monthly suggestion for community members to build their data visualization and presentation skills. It could be a prompt to try a novel graph type, redesign an existing example, or practice a specific technique like chart animation. This month, data storyteller Simon asked us to consider whether data always needs to be communicated in a graph. Simon shares, “When you have just a number or two, writing the numbers themselves can be much more powerful than burying them in a table or graph and potentially losing the impact of the main number you’re looking to share.”

This statement came to mind when I reviewed a chart over the weekend. The chart I’m referring to is a bar graph displaying the weekly weight measurements of my dog, Nemo.

Click through for Alex’s argument. My take on the matter is that the point of visualization is to convey relevant information to your audience. If you can do that with a single word or a single number, you don’t need to go further.

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Equal Sign Alignment with Powershell Hash Tables

Published 2025-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Robbins lays out an argument:

If you ever formatted a hash table in PowerShell, you know how easy it is to focus on function over form. But what if one minor formatting tweak could improve readability, reduce syntax errors, simplify code reviews, and enhance script maintainability? During a recent documentation update, I stumbled on a subtle but powerful practice—aligning the equals signs in hash tables. What began as a style suggestion proved to be a practical improvement that changed how I write PowerShell every day. Here’s why this seemingly minor change deserves a place in your scripting toolbox.

Click through to learn why. This doesn’t apply only to hash tables in Powershell, of course, so you could take this concrete example and extend it to other situations. As an example, this is a very common pattern for managing lengthy configuration files for the same reasons Mike points out. Just as long as your programming language is okay with extra whitespace around the equal sign (or equivalent), you can do this.

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Contained Database Users and Creating Logins

Published 2025-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell does a bit of testing:

A contained user can create a Windows login as its own account, although as it cannot grant connect permissions it is then is unable to connect at all.

So if your vendor application is running as a contained user and during an upgrade it tries to create a login for itself, it will succeed in the creation but then be unable to connect to the SQL Server instance and the upgrade will fail.

Click through for the context and the proof.

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How Random are SQL Server Random Functions?

Published 2025-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rick Dobson publishes a book of guaranteed random numbers, like 41 and 8:

Microsoft provides T-SQL developers with three functions (rand, newid, and crypt_gen_random) for generating random numbers. Each of these functions is effective at returning random values, but feature sets associated with each function make them best suited to different use cases. This tip’s Solution section presents an overview of common use cases for random numbers in SQL Server along with references to learn more about random numbers in SQL Server. The first substantive provides a short comparative overview of the three functions. The remaining tip sections present and describe T-SQL examples for evaluating the randomness of values returned by SQL Server pseudorandom number generators.

Knowing that SQL Server doesn’t have some nice entropy engine (which does exist, typically as an embedded device that plugs in to a USB port) to pull from, it does a pretty good job of things.

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A Primer on Indexing in SQL Server

Published 2025-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill goes back to basics:

“What Is an Index?”
I get this question a lot, especially from developers and sysadmins who’ve been handed a SQL Server and told, “Keep it running fast.” No pressure.

Given that the percentage of people in this industry who have actually seen a phone book continually decreases, it’s for the best that Kevin didn’t use that worn-out example.

If you’re new to indexing in SQL Server, this is a good way to jump-start your knowledge. Then, you spend a while learning the exceptions to the rules and the foibles in existing systems.

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Securing SQL Server Backups to Azure via Managed Identity

Published 2025-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal doesn’t want to generate a SAS token:

I do believe most people know about the ability to backup your SQL server databases to URL (from Azure VMs).  If you recall you would use the storage key ( ideally not) or a SAS token, from there you would create a SQL credential that is bound to the SAS token (as a secret). Lots of moving parts especially when it comes to rotation time. So now, if you are on the newer versions of SQL server (SQL Server 2022 Cumulative Update 17 ) start thinking about backups via managed identities.

Click through to learn how and why.

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