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Curated SQL Posts

Slot Machine Company Data Breach

Jonathan Greig reports on a data breach:

Nevada Restaurant Services (NRS), the owner of popular slot machine parlor chain Dotty’s, has disclosed a data breach that exposed a significant amount of personal and financial information. 

In a statement, the company confirmed that “certain customers” were affected by the breach and explained that the information includes Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers or state ID numbers, passport numbers, financial account and routing numbers, health insurance information, treatment information, biometric data, medical records, taxpayer identification numbers and credit card numbers and expiration dates.

I don’t normally link to data breaches too often because if I did, this site would be renamed to Curated Data Breaches given how frequently they occur. But what I want to know is, why in the world does a slot machine company have passport numbers, health insurance information, and medical records? What are they doing with that information? Slot machines are pretty simple: put quarter in, watch the screen light up and speakers make a bunch of happy noises, repeat until you run out of quarters. Unless there’s some sort of business arrangement where they put slot machines in the Nevada hospitals…

Also, the fact that credit card numbers and expiration dates were lost makes me wonder if they were actually PCI compliant.

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Azure Monitor Logs in Azure Data Studio

Julie Koesmarno has a new extension for us:

The Azure Monitor Logs extension in Azure Data Studio is now available in preview. The extension is supported in Azure Data Studio August 2021 release, v1.32.0.

Administrators can enable platform logging and metrics to one of their Azure services such as Azure SQL and set the destination to Log Analytics workspace. By installing native Azure Monitor Logs extension in Azure Data Studio, users can connect, browse, and query against Log Analytics workspace. Data professionals who are using Azure SQL, Azure PostgreSQL, or Azure Data Explorer in Azure Data Studio can access the data in the Log Analytics workspace for diagnosis or auditing in that same development environment. This native Azure Monitor Logs extension allows Azure service customers to also author notebooks with Log Analytics kernel, all equipped with Intellisense.

Click through for examples of how to use this.

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Data Personas and Data Platform Rights

Craig Porteous wants us thinking about roles and permissions:

There are a great number of factors that contribute to an organisation’s data maturity, both technical and non-technical. The non-technical factors often have the biggest impact however. Such as how open to change the business’s upper management is, how much data is embraced by department and team leaders, and the training and support provided to utilise new technologies. All of these factors set the expectation and appetite for change within the business much more than the role out of a new product or technology.

Data Personas are one such area that contribute greatly towards Data Maturity as they define responsibility and access beyond the roles and job titles of team members. Individual team members may fit multiple personas or none at all. There are five core Data Personas that need to be established within an organisation for effective data governance and management with some additional personas on the periphery that can map a bit more to specific technical roles. The number of personas will vary depending on the maturity of the organisation’s data platform and their use of data but the core personas are relevant to all organisations.

Click through for an example set of personas and what kinds of rights they would need, broken down in a matrix of environment and data layer.

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Deleting Duplicate Records

Chad Callihan shows one of the best ways to remove duplicate records from a table:

Have you ever needed to delete duplicate records from a table? If there is only one duplicate in a table then simply running something like DELETE FROM Table WHERE ID = @DupRecord will do the trick. What happens when the problem is found after multiple records are duplicated? Will tracking them all down be more time consuming? Here are a few different options for quickly clearing out duplicate records.

There’s the best way, and then there are the other ways.

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Type 1 SCDs in Delta Lake

Chris Williams starts a series on slowly changing dimensions in a Delta Lake:

Anyone that has contributed towards a Data Warehouse or a dimensional model in Power BI will know the distinction made between the time-series metrics of a Fact Table and the categorised attributes of a Dimension Table. These dimensions are also affected by the passage of time and require revised descriptions periodically which is why they are known as Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD). See The Data Warehouse Toolkit – Kimball & Ross for more information.

Here is where the Delta Lake comes in. Using its many features such as support for ACID transactions (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) and schema enforcement we can create the same durable SCD’s. This may have required a series of complicated SQL statements in the past to achieve this. I will now discuss a few of the most common SCD’s and show how they can be easily achieved using a few Databricks Notebooks, which are available from my GitHub repo so you can download and have a go:

https://github.com/cwilliams87/Blog-SCDs

Check out the repo, but be sure to read the whole post.

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Adjusting Bar Widths in Excel

Elizabeth Ricks explains how you can change the width of a bar in Excel:

Before we get into the step-by-step, I should mention that there aren’t any strict rules for optimal spacing between bars. Rather, it’s personal preference similar to wearing white after Labor Day (in the U.S., that’s the first weekend in September). As a resident of the muggy Southeast, I’ll be rocking white until fall temperatures arrive in mid-October. However, if you live in cooler climes and consider Labor Day the symbolic end of summer, your preference might be to say sayonara to white until Memorial Day. 

The same gray area goes for optimal spacing between bars. The actual width is not set in stone. Our goal is to enable our audiences to compare the lengths of the bars (instead of the area between them), so general guidance is to thicken the bars to minimize the surrounding white space.

Click through for the process.

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Reviewing Encryption Code Snippets from Stack Overflow

Scott Contini explains some problems with popular encryption code snippets on Stack Overflow:

I’m not doing this to shame those who have made mistakes: Instead, I want to do my part to help fix the problem. As an AppSec specialist, I get really tired of having the same discussions over and over. I try real hard to make it easy for people to do the right thing: I point them to code that is safe to use, such as Luke Park’s Secure Compatible Encryption Examples. Despite this, there are the occasional teams who just continue to resist, even before the code has made it to production which is the best time to fix it. This makes everybody’s lives more difficult: it wastes my time to have to explain to them why their code is wrong, and it forces the teams to have to do a lot more work later because once the bad cryptography is in production, they need a migration plan to fix it.

Read on for a great explanation of common problems in encryption code.

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Monitoring Azure Data Factory, Integration Runtimes, and Pipelines

Sandeep Arora monitors all the things:

For effective monitoring of ADF pipelines, we are going to use Log Analytics, Azure Monitor and Azure Data Factory Analytics. The above illustration shows the architectural representation of the monitoring setup.

The details of setting up log analytics, alerts and Azure Data Factory Analytics are further discussed in this section.

If you manage Azure Data Factory in your environment, give this a read.

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Moving Azure Purview Sources between Collections

Wolfgang Strasser has a future review of past activities:

Yesterday, Andy Cutler (t) asked me on twitter, if the move of a registered source between collections is possible.

My first answer was, yes sure… And I also included a screenshot from one of my Purview accounts (which – this will be important in the following – is a legacy Purview account).

But – tech isn’t tech without some differentiation between versions and available options

Read the whole thing.

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