A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jordan Boich tells it like it is:
As anyone in IT will tell you, when an outage strikes, and all hands are on deck, that is something that will wake you up faster than any cup of coffee. That was me. Waking up trying to get my bearings to take part in addressing an outage with my bed-head in full effect (Thank you Microsoft Teams for giving that little preview window to show what you look like before you turn on your camera).
Click through for the full story.
Leave a CommentGreg Low makes use of an uncommon function:
If your T-SQL is buried under layers of nested
REPLACE()calls just to swap out a few characters, there’s a simpler way. SQL Server’sTRANSLATE()function — introduced in 2017 but still rarely used — lets you replace multiple characters in a single string with one function call instead of stacking severalREPLACE()functions inside each other.This guide covers how
TRANSLATE()works, how it compares toREPLACE(), and where it falls short compared to other SQL dialects like PostgreSQL and Oracle.
One important thing to remember with TRANSLATE() is that it’s a character-for-character replacement. In other words, if you TRANSLATE('ABCDEFG', 'x'), it will replace every instance of each of those characters with the letter “x.” It doesn’t replace a substring.
Aaron Bertrand sees that it’s all funhouse mirrors:
On this site, we usually talk about SQL Server performance problems that involve execution plans, locking, indexes, and waits. But SQL Server Agent can determine when backups, maintenance, ETL, monitoring, and reporting all arrive at the instance. In a way, a job deployment script is part of your performance configuration: you can materially impact the workload if you accidentally share a schedule across too many jobs.
I often create jobs in test environments that will later get distributed to many servers, often in isolated environments that can’t see each other. Creating an idempotent script to create a job, but only if it doesn’t already exist, can be cumbersome to get right. Many will prefer to use DbaTools Copy-DbaAgentJob, and that can be a great option if your deployment mechanism is PowerShell, DbaTools is already entrenched in your environment, and you can run the script from a place that can see the other server. In our case, T-SQL scripts are often passed on to colleagues or automation to be run independently in a different environment. Apologies to friends of SSMS, but the default right-click > Script Job output leaves a lot to be desired:
Click through for a variety of problems that the scripting logic has, as well as the solution Aaron came up with.
Leave a CommentVlad Drumea performs some tests:
After the ANCPI hack that took down Romania’s land registry, Andrei Avădănei, CEO of Bit Sentinel and founder of DefCamp, published on LinkedIn a detailed proposal for a national offensive security program.
It covered pentesting frameworks, vulnerability disclosure, continuous monitoring, and accountability measures. The proposal was thorough, logical, and exclusively focused on prevention and detection.I left a comment suggesting one addition: mandatory disaster recovery simulations.
Can institution X recover after their entire production environment is encrypted? If so, how long does it take and what data is lost? Are there backups? And if yes, are they actually viable, or are they Schrödinger’s backups, where you only find out whether they work at the exact moment you need them?This exchange made me realize that organizations, especially in the public sector, rarely consider doing disaster recovery tests.
I’ve been on the edges of DR scenarios at prior jobs, including one at a state agency. Most of the time, the tests have to be hypothetical or piecemeal because we rarely had the hardware to support a full switch-over, or the budget to spin up an equivalent set of hardware in a different region.
Leave a CommentAndy Brownsword gets beyond SQL Server 2000:
Date handling in SQL Server tends to accumulate tried and trusted combinations of
DATEPART(),DATEADD(), andDATEDIFF()– with nested variations. The challenge with these isn’t raw performance, but more with conveying intent and readability.So let’s look at some simpler patterns to try and avoid some of these and be clearer with what we’re trying to achieve.
Click through for some functions that have been around since 2012, and others that just became available in 2022.
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