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Curated SQL Posts

The Power BI Gateway

Published 2017-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains how the Power BI gateway works:

You don’t need a gateway in all scenarios. Only if the data source is located on-premises, you need a gateway. For online or cloud-based data sources, no gateway is required. For example; if you are getting data from CRM Online, you don’t need a gateway. However, if you are getting data from SQL Server database located on your local domain server, then you need a gateway. For Azure SQL DB you don’t need a gateway. However, a SQL Server database located on Azure Virtual Machine is considered as on-premises and needs gateway.

This post could not have come at a better time for me, so I’m definitely happy to see it.

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Take The 2018 Data Professional Salary Survey

Published 2017-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has the 2018 edition of his Data Professional Salary Survey:

A few things to know:

  • It’s totally anonymous (we’re not getting your email, IP address, or anything like that.)

  • It’s open to all database platforms.

  • As with last year’s results, we’ll publish the raw data in Excel for anyone to analyze. If you want to set up your analysis ahead of time, here’s the incoming raw results as they happen, and we’ll share them in that exact same format.

Please take the survey, especially if you’re hitting Curated SQL for the analytics or Hadoop/Spark side of things rather than the SQL Server side.  That way there’s a broader distribution of entries.

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Failed To Open Loopback Connection

Published 2017-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal diagnoses a connection problem:

I could not read my error log on one of my local SQL Servers, when I executed the following code:

EXEC sp_readerrorlog

I received the below:

Msg 22004, Level 16, State 1, Line 2 Failed to open loopback connection. Please see event log for more information. Msg 22004, Level 16, State 1, Line 2 Error log location not found.

Fortunately, the error logs had a bit more detail, so Arun has the answer for you.

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Unable To Create The Certificate Binding

Published 2017-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Hamish Watson walks through changing an expired certificate in SQL Server Reporting Services:

This blog post is around the situation where you have SSRS setup to use HTTPS and thus using a certificate and the certificate expires (or just needs replacing). We had caught the initial error via our Continuous Monitoring of the SSRS site — basically when the certificate expired we got an exception and alerted on it.

The client installed a new certificate but the issue arose where in Reporting Service Configuration Manager we went to use the new certificate but when we chose it we got this error:

“We are unable to create the certificate binding”

Read on to see how to get past this.

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Protecting Sensitive Data In Docker

Published 2017-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Jatin Demla shows how to create Docker secrets:

Managing the password, access tokens and private keys are being tedious in the application. Any small mistakes accidentally expose all the secret information. Even storing such thing in docker images can be easily accessible one should just run the image in the interactive mode container and all your application code is available in containers. Docker provides secrets to protect all secret data.

This blog explains the low-level of storage information as well as secured access to docker secret. so, let’s get started.

Read the whole thing, especially if you’ve gone container-happy.

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Taking A Random Walk

Published 2017-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Dan Goldstein describes the basics of Brownian motion:

I was sitting in a bagel shop on Saturday with my 9 year old daughter. We had brought along hexagonal graph paper and a six sided die. We decided that we would choose a hexagon in the middle of the page and then roll the die to determine a direction:

1 up (North)
2 diagonal to the upper right (Northeast)
3 diagonal to the lower right (Southeast)
4 down (South)
5 diagonal to the lower left (Southwest)
6 diagonal to the upper left (Northwest)

Our first roll was a six so we drew a line to the hexagon northwest of where we started. That was the first “step.”

After a few rolls we found ourselves coming back along a path we had gone down before. We decided to draw a second line close to the first in those cases.

We did this about 50 times. The results are pictured above, along with kid hands for scale.

Javi Fernandez-Lopez then shows how to generate an animated GIF displaying Brownian motion:

Last Monday we celebrated a “Scientific Marathon” at Royal Botanic Garden in Madrid, a kind of mini-conference to talk about our research. I was talking about the relation between fungal spore size and environmental variables such as temperature and precipitation. To make my presentation more friendly, I created a GIF to explain the Brownian Motion model. In evolutionary biology, we can use this model to simulate the random variation of a continuous trait through time. Under this model, we can notice how closer species tend to maintain closer trait values due to shared evolutionary history. You have a lot of information about Brownian Motion models in evolutionary biology everywhere!

Another place that this is useful is in describing stock market movements in the short run.

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API Security: Contrasting Token-Based With Key-Based Security

Published 2017-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Vincent-Philippe Lauzon contrasts token-based security (like OAuth) with key-based security for locking down APIs:

Instead of giving a nice & neatly formatted pros & cons table where all the pros have a corresponding cons, let’s just discuss the major aspects:  security & complexity.

Basically, in general, OAuth is more secure but more complex for both clients (i.e. consumer) and services.

Why is OAuth more secure?  Relying parties never see credentials & secrets in an OAuth authentication scheme.  They see a token.  Token are revoked after a while ; often minutes, maximum a few hours.

Read on for more.  My preference is OAuth, but it’s not always trivial to set up.

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SQL Vulnerability Assessment

Published 2017-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Ronit Reger shows off the new SQL Vulnerability Assessment, available in SQL Server 2012 and later:

Not only does VA expose some of the possible security flaws you have in your database system, it also provides remediation scripts to resolve issues within a couple of mouse clicks. In addition, you can accept specific results as your approved baseline state, and the VA scan report will be customized accordingly to expect these values.

Ronit and Alan Yu also mention it being available via the latest version of Management Studio, 17.4:

The VA service runs a scan directly on your SQL database or server. VA employs a knowledge base of rules that flag security vulnerabilities and deviations from best practices, such as misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and exposed sensitive data. The rule base grows and evolves over time, to reflect the latest security best practices recommended by Microsoft.

Results of the assessment include actionable steps to resolve each issue and provide customized remediation scripts where applicable. An assessment report can be customized for each customer environment and tailored to specific requirements. This process is managed by defining a security Baseline for the assessment results, such that only deviations from the custom Baseline are reported.

VA is supported for SQL Server 2012 and later, and can also be run on Azure SQL Database.

This looks like a good reason to upgrade SSMS.

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More Collation Comparison Fun

Published 2017-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky wraps up his collation comparison series:

Just in case you were wondering: No, the test directly above test does not prove the documentation (as quoted at the top of Part A) correct. Yes, the documentation did state that characters would be converted to the Code Page specified by the Collation of the Database or Column, which does appear to be what is going on here. But, the differences are:

  1. The documentation states that the transformation happens if you reference a Unicode datatype, but what we just saw in the most recent test is the exact opposite:

    • only the NVARCHAR columns of the “Subscript 2” row match because they are still the “Subscript 2” character, while the NVARCHAR columns of the other two rows do not match due to being either “2” or “?”.
    • transformation did occur in the Latin1 and Hebrew VARCHAR columns, which is how it matched both rows with “2” in the Latin1 column and both rows with “?” in the Hebrew column.

  2. In the scenario involving another column where it would help to prefix the string literal with a capital-“N” (i.e. a VARCHAR column using a Collation that specifies a different Code Page than the Database’s Code Page), the Collation of the Database is not used for the transformation; it is only the referenced column’s Collation. The assumption here is that the string literal without the capital-“N” is being used in a Database where the Collation specifies a Code Page that has all of the characters.

  3. In the scenarios where the Database’s Collation, via its specified Code Page, did transform a string literal that was not prefixed with a capital-“N” (the two tests in the previous post), there would have already been unintended behavior no matter how the string literal was used.

I still think it’s a duck.

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Using List.Accumulate

Published 2017-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows off a Power Query function which is not available in the UI:

List.Accumulate is a function that can easily save a number of steps in your Power Query transformations, instead of applying multiple steps, you can simply use List.Accumulate to overcome what you want. List.Accumulate function loops through the list and accumulate a value as a result. This function needs usually three parameters; the list itself, seed, and accumulator. Here are parameters explained in details;

best way to learn about seed and accumulator is through some examples, let’s apply some transformations with List.Accumulate and see how these two parameters are working.

Read on to see how to use it.

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