Sql-Server

When I’m working in client sites, I get really concerned when I see personal data not being handled or protected appropriately.  And one of the biggest sins that I see is where developers have pretended to be encrypting data, but they really aren’t encrypting it.

I’m sure that looks good for a manager but please, just don’t do this !

When I look at the table definition shown in the main image above, my eye is drawn to the column called EncryptedTFN. In Australia, we refer to our tax numbers as TFNs. They are 11 digits long for most people and should never be stored in plain text in a database. The column should be encrypted.

2020-10-27

I’m pleased to let you know that version 20 of our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs is now released. It’s all SQL Server and T-SQL goodness.

If you haven’t been using SDU Tools yet, I’d suggest downloading them and taking a look. At the very least, it can help when you’re trying to work out how to code something in T-SQL. You’ll find them here:

https://sdutools.sqldownunder.com

Along with the normal updates to SQL Server versions and builds, we’ve added the following new functions:

2020-10-22

Once again today, I was asked by a developer, how you can “turn off those annoying completion time messages in SSMS”.

A few releases of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) back, the product team decided that we’d all like completion times shown in the Messages output tab. I don’t share their enthusiasm for them.

For a start, a completion time was already shown here in the Properties window for the query, along with much more info:

2020-10-21

I was reading posts in an email distribution list yesterday and someone asked if SQL Server Replication was deprecated. First up, let’s just confirm that it’s not. As Mark Twain said: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”. There’s still a really strong need for it, and somewhat ironically, that need has been getting stronger lately.

Back when replication was introduced, it had a bit of a reputation for being hard to set up, and hard to look after. It was in the same category as features like clustering. If I was teaching a SQL Server 6.5 class, you could tell which students could follow instructions if they managed to get clustering working. Fortunately, it’s nothing like that today but you’ll still hear from people with “old pain”.

2020-10-15

I’ve been in so many companies lately where new CTOs and CIOs claim to have a cloud focus, but all they want to do is migrate all their existing systems from on-premises VMs to cloud-based VMs. They talk about making a cloud transformation but they’re not transforming anything.

I was pleased to get a chance to create a short educational series for the people at PASS to cover some of my thoughts on how to make a real transformation, not just a migration.

2020-10-09

Recently,  I did an interview with Amit Bansal and the team from Data Platform Geeks about some of the aspects involved in implementing Power BI in the Enterprise.

We touched at some length on security and a number of issues around data models.

You can find the interview here: http://www.dataplatformgeeks.com/geek-talk-sep-03-2020-dr-greg-low-enterprise-power-bi/

2020-09-11

Power BI is amazing. And it’s starting to appear all over the place. Many enterprises don’t know what to make of it though. Some are scared that it’ll be the “next Access” where stores of uncontrolled data end up all over the organization. Power BI’s mantra of “5 minutes to Wow” is spot on. It’s easy to be impressed. But enterprises are often struggling with “what comes next after that 5 minutes?”

2020-08-07

In some upcoming posts, I’ll discuss how you can change between data types, but I wanted to show you first, how you can use the FORMAT() function to convert dates and times to strings.

This query asks for the current date and time value formatted as day then month, then (four digit) year. It also includes the desired culture (en-US) which would be used if the format required any culture-specific items, such as the names of months.

2020-07-13

I mentioned in the last T-SQL post how you could create a datetimeoffset value by combining a datetime2 with an offset. But sometimes you need to switch to a different offset. And that’s what the SWITCHOFFSET() function does:

In this query, I was taking a local time (that had a timezone offset of 11 hours), and switching it to the current time in Seattle (with a -7 hours offset):

2020-07-06

It’s great to have SQL Server data types now that handle time zone offsets. Sometimes though, you need to combine a datetime value and an offset to produce one of these new values. That’s what the TODATETIMEOFFSET() function does:

In this example, I’ve taken 28th February 2019 and added a timezone offset of 10 hours to it:

the output data type is datetimeoffset.

The data type of the first value is actually datetime2.

2020-06-29