A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Umachandar Jayachandran makes an announcement:
In June 2021, we announced that Microsoft Machine Learning Server & Microsoft R Open will be retired on July 1, 2022. In continuation with the retirement process, the Microsoft R Application Network (MRAN) website and CRAN Time Machine will be retired on July 1, 2023.
If you are using MRAN, click through and review the dates so you don’t have the rug pulled out from under you.
Comments closedImke Feldmann continues building functions:
Excel’s PMT function returns the payment for a loan based on constant payments and a constant interest rate. Using some clever math, it can be deducted via one formula (see rows 9-11):
As always, read on for the function contents and explanation. Imke also includes a video on applying custom functions to an existing Power BI solution.
Comments closedIn the past I’ve written about monitoring identity columns to ensure there’s room to grow.
But there’s a related danger that’s a little more subtle. Say you have a table whose identity column is an 8-byte bigint. An application that converts those values to a 4-byte integer will not always fail! Those applications will only fail if the value is larger than 2,147,483,647.
This post specifically pertains to identity columns but don’t forget those non-identity columns when testing.
Comments closedMatthew McGiffen explains one area of limitation with transparent data encryption:
TDE encrypts data stored on the file system, so it should be pretty clear that we are trying to protect ourselves from an attacker who gets access to our files. You would be right in suggesting that shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Access controls should be in place to prevent inappropriate access. The reality though is that sometimes we get hacked and someone is able to work around our access controls. Sometimes backup files are stored offsite with a different organization where we do not control the access. That is why we have encryption – encryption is an extra line of defense. TDE offers no protection however against individuals who have direct access to query the database.
Let’s say someone does get access to our files – does TDE mean we are still sufficiently protected?
My problem with TDE is something Simon McCauliffe wrote about a few years back (Wayback Machine link because the actual site went down in 2020): if you have root-level access to the server, you can ultimately get access to all of the keys to break TDE. I suppose the level of effort involved is high and that will mitigate the risk, but it’s always there.
2 CommentsB.C. Gain reports on sessions from PromCon EU 2022:
Prometheus’ installations are now in the hundreds of thousands range with millions of users, Richard (RichiH) Hartmann, director of community at Grafana Labs and a CNCF Technical Advisory Group Observability chair, said during his talk “I don’t have to convince this room that Prometheus is a de facto standard in cloud native metric based monitoring.”
But as Prometheus’ maintainers celebrate its 10-year anniversary, the community’s needs for monitoring Kubernetes are evolving quickly. Users are also becoming smarter about what they want and need. PromCon EU 2022, held in Munich in November, the Prometheus annual user’s conference, served as a forum about how and why Prometheus must evolve and what Prometheus maintainers must do.
Prometheus is a critical part of the modern service monitoring stack; read on to learn more about histogram updates and work at the core which should help Prometheus users along the way.
Comments closedLaetitia Avrot has some advice:
This is why, when I’m called for a performance problem (or for an audit), my first take is to look at the size of the data compared to the size of the indexes. If you store more indexes than data for a transactional workload, that’s bad. The worst I’ve seen was a database with 12 times more indexes stored on disk than data! Of course, it was a transactional workload… Would you buy a cooking book with 10 pages of recipes and 120 pages of indexes at the end of the book?
The problem with indexes is that each time you write (insert, update, delete), you will have to write to the indexes too! That can become very costly in resources and time.
Click through for some Postgres-specific guidance and links to some useful scripts along the way.
Comments closedWolfgang Strasser has been on the Purview beat:
A lot happened in the Microsoft Data Governance area, especially in the area of Microsoft Purview Data Governance.
Let’s go back in history and wrap up the announcements that have been made in Microsoft (Azure) Purview area. My main source for this summary is the Security, Compliance and Identity Blog.
Wolfgang has the set of changes as a bulleted list for easy digestion.
Comments closedChris Webb points out another benefit of DAX window functions:
The new DAX window functions (announced here, more details on Jeffrey Wang’s blog here and here) have generated a lot of excitement already – they are extremely powerful. However one important benefit of using them has not been mentioned so far: they can give you much better performance in DirectQuery mode because they make it more likely that aggregations are used. After all, the fastest DirectQuery datasets are the ones that can use aggregations (ideally Import mode aggregations) as much as possible.
As always, Chris has a demo for us, so check it out.
Comments closedHugo Calzada Martin recovers from an oopsie:
If we have a Customer-managed TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) and we delete by mistake the entire “Azure Key Vault” or just the “Key” object, the database will be inaccessible:
Read on for Hugo’s response as well as how to recover from this scenario. There are examples of how to do this in the Portal, in Powershell, and the CLI.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino operates a Mac:
Last week I purchased a shiny new MacBook Air with an M2 processor. After I got all the standard stuff up and running, I set out to learn how to run SQL Server containers on this new hardware. This post shows you how to run SQL Server on Apple Silicon using colima.
Colima is a container runtime that runs a Linux VM on your Mac. This Linux VM runs using the Virtualization framework hypervisor native in MacOS. Your containers will run inside this virtual machine.
Read on to see what you’d need for the task.
Comments closed