A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jon Russell clarifies the situation:
SQL Server administrators often encounter Microsoft updates labeled as “CU + GDR”, and understandably, this can cause confusion — especially when trying to stay on a consistent CU-based servicing path. This post clarifies what “CU + GDR” really means and why it’s not something to worry about.
Read on for an overview of the different security models, as well as the odd duck in SQL Server 2016.
Leave a CommentReza Rad takes us through data changes:
Column or Bar chart can be easily used for showing a single measure’s insight across a category. Mixed charts such as Line and Column chart can be used for showing two measure and comparing their values across a set of categories. However there are some charts that can be used to show values of three measures, such as Scatter Chart. Scatter chart not only shows values of three measure across different categories, it also has a special Play axis that helps you to tell the story behind the data. In this post you’ll learn how easy is to visualize something with Scatter chart and tell a story with that. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read Power BI online book; from Rookie to Rock Star.
Read on for the blog post as well as a video version.
Leave a CommentShittu Olumide recommends a few other packages:
If you’ve worked with data in Python, chances are you’ve used Pandas many times. And for good reason; it’s intuitive, flexible, and great for day-to-day analysis. But as your datasets start to grow, Pandas starts to show its limits. Maybe it’s memory issues, sluggish performance, or the fact that your machine sounds like it’s about to lift off when you try to group by a few million rows.
That’s the point where a lot of data analysts and scientists start asking the same question: what else is out there?
Read on for seven options, including six libraries and one built-in programming technique.
Leave a CommentOsheen MacOscar looks at a new version of an old package:
In this blog post, we are going to use data from the {gapminder} R package, along with global spatial boundaries from ‘opendatasoft’. We are going to plot the life expectancy of each country in the Americas and animate it to see the changes from 1957 to 2007.
The {gapminder} package we are using is from the Gapminder foundation, an independent educational non-profit fighting global misconceptions. The cover issues like global warming, plastic in the oceans and life satisfaction.
There are several common gotchas that Osheen takes us through before building an animated map of the western hemisphere.
Leave a CommentDavid Fitzjarrell takes a look at some settings:
Passwords expire, and, depending upon how various profiles are configured, accounts are either locked or provided a grace period during which the old password can be changed. In any recent enterprise password verification functions are provided to police new passwords to ensure a modicum of security. Let’s dig into what Oracle provides to assist in password security.
Basic elements of password security that Oracle provides start with the profile; listed below are the associated resources:
Read on for the available options you can set on a per-profile basis.
Leave a CommentSanthosh Kumar Ravindran announces a feature in general availability:
We’re thrilled to announce the general availability (GA) of Autoscale Billing for Apache Spark in Microsoft Fabric — a serverless billing model designed to offer greater flexibility, transparency, and cost efficiency for running Spark workloads at scale.
With this model now fully supported, Spark Jobs can run independently of your Fabric capacity and are billed on a pay-as-you-go basis — similar to how Spark works in Azure Synapse. This gives teams the freedom to scale compute as needed without impacting other workloads running on your shared Fabric capacity.
I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, there is value to having this as an option. On the other hand, one of the talking points for Microsoft Fabric is that you have one billing model. But because it’s an optional thing you can enable rather than something you must use, I’m fine with it.
Leave a CommentAndy Brownsword lays out an argument:
Code is an ever moving target. Version control and documentation only go so far, if they even exist. Sometimes all you have is the code in front of you.
This is why I always start stored procedures with a header.
There was a time I strongly resisted this idea, but if you are diligent about keeping this up to date, it can be very useful for record-keeping, especially if your company has a tendency to switch source control systems and not keep the history between moves.
Leave a CommentAndrew Pruski hits a REST API:
The sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint stored procedure that’s available in 2025 allows for SQL Server to hit external rest endpoints…which opens up quite a few interesting options.
I was thinking about this the other day and it occurred to me that Kubernetes has a REST API
But it’s not going to be trivial to hit, so click through for the steps.
Leave a CommentAdam Gladstone wraps up a series on an R add-in for Excel:
In the last post in this series I am going to look at calling Python from R. Even though Excel now provides a means of calling Python scripts directly, using the
=PY()formula in a worksheet, there are still occasions when it is beneficial to call Python via R. For example, it turns out that importingyfinanceproduces a ‘module not found’ error using Excel’s function. According to the documentation,yfinanceis not one of the open source libraries that the Excel Python secure distribution supports. To get around this issue, we can use the R package Reticulate. This lets us load and run Python scripts from R. As we have seen in the previous parts of this series, the ExcelRAddIn allows us to run R scripts from an Excel worksheet. And putting these two together is quite simple.
I’m glad Adam mentioned this because my first question was going to be, why use this when Excel has Python capabilities built in? And that’s a reasonable answer.
Leave a CommentLast week, I asked if your database administrators could read all of the data in all databases. The results (which may be different from this post, because I’m writing the post ahead of time and the poll is still open):
In a lot of cases, this doesn’t really matter much. In places where it does matter (for example, reading protected health information or critical financial data), there should be controls in place. I’ve always been on the side of this issue that says that yes, you do need to be able to trust your administrators at the end of the day, because somebody’s going to need a way to get to that data in case of company emergency. But as a company grows and there are additional opportunities for division of labor and specialization, you do open up the possibility of stronger controls, proper auditing, limiting certain data access to privileged accounts, and consequences for violating the rules.
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