A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Grant Fritchey shows how to build Elastic Query views to obscure underlying table names:
Creating a view, or any other query, that joins across databases using Elastic Query works just fine. However, if you want to mask things using a view, you might need to get a little creative in how you implement Elastic Query. The good news is, Elastic Query is somewhat, shall we say, elastic in how you set it up. More so than it immediately appears.
Interesting.
Comments closedSlava Murygin has updated his script to include memory-optimized and temporal tables:
There is also new column called “Temporal”. It indicates if a table is System Versioned or it is Historical repository. Row_Count number for Historical repository indicates number of changes done to the main table. That option is applicable only for SQL Server 2016.
I’ve updated only “Ctrl-F1” button, which returns list of tables within a database. Here is the link to the full script archive:https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5yWoyX1eEWqZ3FJUnNHZm80bzQ
Check out his script.
Comments closedBill Anton is sharing data from a March survey:
Instead of digging into the data and spoon feeding you the results, I’ve created a Power Pivot model (download link) that you can use to explore for yourself. I’d also like to invite you to share any interesting insights you uncover in the comments section and/or provide feedback on this little survey experiment (missing questions, phrasing, etc).
Happy digging.
Comments closedJoey D’Antoni has additional information on licensing for SQL Server 2016:
SQL Server 2016 launched last week to great reviews and with a ton of great new features. I have been working with this version for well over a year now and extremely happy to see it hit RTM and be broadly adopted. So as DBAs it always sucks when you get excited about new features, only to find out the price changed, or vendor “O” made that feature a cost option. So what’s new with SQL Server 2016 licensing? (you won’t this as a session title at any upcoming SQL Server events). Well first the good news—SQL Server 2016 is the same price and 2012 and 2014 (roughly $6800 core for Enterprise Edition). That’s definitely good news—Microsoft gave us a bunch of new functionality and didn’t raise the price. Additionally, if you see my below post on what is in Standard Edition, they added a lot of functionality there, too.
But we know finance and marketing employees have jobs to do as well, and there is no way they were letting a major version release happen without some changes. So let’s take a look at the one’s Denny Cherry (b|t) and I could glean out of the licensing guide. Please download and read for yourself.
There are a couple of interesting nuances that you’ll want to read up on.
Comments closedRegis Baccaro shows how to change the user language in SSRS 2016:
Changing it to Spanish and refreshing the browser changed the SSRS user language to Spanish without me having to add a language at all.
To change the user language of SSRS 2016 you need only to change the Formatting Region setting from the control panel – nothing else !
The issue I tend to have with this is that different tools tend to behave differently when you start changing the format settings. I recall Excel being particularly finicky about it.
Comments closedGlenn Berry has a new update of his diagnostic queries, focused around SQL Server 2014 and 2016:
This month, I have several improvements in the SQL Server 2014 and 2016 sets, along with additional comments and documentation in the SQL Server 2012, 2014 and 2016 sets. One new feature is a series of six dashes after each query to make them easier to parse by people who use PowerShell to run the queries and collect the results. I have gotten quite a bit of interest about making a special version of these queries for SQL Database in Microsoft Azure. So, I will be doing that pretty soon.
If you don’t already use Glenn’s queries, I highly recommend them as a starting point in tracking down issues.
Comments closedManoj Pandey notes that Polybase has a row size limit:
With the error description its quiet evident that the External tables does not support row size more than 32768 bytes. But still I take a look online and found in Azure Documentation that this is a limitation right now with Polybase. The Azure document mentions:
Wide rows support is not supported yet, “If you are using Polybase to load your tables, define your tables so that the maximum possible row size, including the full length of variable length columns, does not exceed 32,767 bytes. While you can define a row with variable length data that can exceed this figure, and load rows with BCP, you will not be be able to use Polybase to load this data quite yet. Polybase support for wide rows will be added soon. Also, try to limit the size of your variable length columns for even better throughput for running queries.”
You can still use varchar(max) and nvarchar(max) for data types (unlike the Hive provider, which has a strict limit of 8000 characters for a single column) but can’t break that 32K mark.
Comments closedLeila Etaati shows us how to integrate R charts in the Power BI experience:
In previous videos you’ve learned that we can demonstrate R visualization in Power BI, In this video you will learn how R visualization is working interactively with other elements in Power BI report. In fact Power BI works with R charts as a regular visualization and highlighting and selecting items in other elements of report will effect on that. Here is a quick video about this functionality
Check out the five-minute video.
Comments closedCody Konior has uncovered a bug in SQL Server 2016 RTM pertaining to bulk insertion:
The bug itself is triggered by a combination of > 2000 lines of data and a lot of fields; I’ve been able to reproduce it with 2189 lines and 130 delimiters as an example which you can download here.
Here’s hoping CU1 will have that fixed.
Comments closedRafael San Miguel Carrasco uses dimensionality reduction to figure out if a domain is malicious:
Dimensionality reduction is a common techique to visualize observations in a dataset, by combining all features into two, that can then be used to draw the observation in an scatter plot.
One popular algorithm that implements this technique is PCA (Principal Components Analysis), which is available in R through the prcomp() function.
The algorithm was applied to observations of sthe dataset, and ggplot2’s geom_point() function was used to draw the results in a 2D chart.
I would want to see this done for a couple hundred thousand domains, but I do like the idea of taking advantage of statistical modeling tools to find security threats.
Comments closed