One great result from PASS Summit, especially when we are close to a new SQL Server release, is to identify important technologies to study on the following year. PASS Summit 2018 was great, with sessions about many new technologies giving us very good guidance on where to focus our study for the new year. Let’s … Read more
Most years, by the time the PASS Summit has finished, I have at least written the basics of my wrap-up blog to the conference, usually when I am sitting at SEATAC eating my breakfast pizza from the little Italian restaurant. It may take me a few days or a week to post it, but that … Read more
If you are, as you should be, checking JSON data in a whole lot of files before you import them into your database, you would do well to use JSON Schema, because you can run a number of checks such as regex checks that can’t be done any other way, and it is usually possible … Read more
You might think that it is easy to get JSON data from a spreadsheet, and there are plenty of utilities around that are based on the idea that it is trivial. If such data was strictly tabular, then it might be. The problem is that any conversion tool makes assumptions about the way that data … Read more
We’re going to set up a web service for a SQL Server database using node js on a windows server. This is intended for a mobile application, but has a variety of other uses where an ODBC connection isn’t possible. This service is purely done as a demonstration for people with a database background, so … Read more
The summit is my favorite time of year, but this is literally my least favorite post of every year (and yes, I do consider NOT posting it every year, this year more than most!) It is that time when I take my previous year’s resolutions (centered squarely on the most important 12-ish month period, from … Read more
In my blog Calculating a Security Principal’s Effective Rights. I built a view, named Utilty.EffectiveSecurity that you could query to fetch a security principal’s rights to objects in a database. In that blog I tested the code and showed how it works. Now I have taken this to the extreme and expanded the view to … Read more
There are several SQL Saturday events I have attended every event that has existed. Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga (didn’t speak one of the years), and (I am pretty sure) Birmingham. On October 6, I will add one more to this list. The inaugural SQL Saturday Memphis! Having lived in Nashville for 20 or so years before … Read more
Security. Oh that most painful of topics. I discussed it a few months earlier when I discussed the need to give rights only through roles to users, so everything is the same in dev and prod except the users who are placed in each role (SQL Server Database Security And Source Control). As I was … Read more
I am in the middle of working on my DB Design conference that occurs in a bit over a week from now. But I had this come up in some work I was doing and wanted to put it down in a blog. One of the most exciting features of SQL Server 2005 was the … Read more
Thanks to Andy Warren (@sqlandy), on Thursday, September 13, I will be in Orlando, FL teaching an all-day seminar on the process of designing and implementing a relational database, entitled “Constructing a SQL Server Database.” Throughout the following 7 modules, we will make some requirements, model the database, create tables, with foreign keys, check constraints, … Read more
Having spent a lot of my working life trying to preserve the integrity of data, there was a certain intriguing novelty in the idea of pseudonymizing data. One of the standard techniques of pseudonymization is that of shuffling data columns as though you are shuffling cards. The original values are kept but placed in the … Read more
I haven’t seen a SQL Server table with real unencrypted credit card numbers for several years, and I don’t know of any good reasons to have them stored that way. However, I’ve needed them in the past for testing a web application that had to take credit card details. Generating credit cards in a way … Read more
The other day, I had a problem with some data that I never dreamed I would ever see. In a case insensitive database, in a table’s column that was case insensitive, the customer was using the data as case sensitive. Firstly, let’s just go ahead and say it. “This was a sucky implementation.” But as … Read more
I remember the first time I used WPF. It was a while ago. So long ago, if I am remembering correctly, that there was no text box control. No, I am not joking. Microsoft stated that the workaround was to simply create your own textbox using WPF because it was so easy and awesome. I distinctly … Read more
This weekend, I will be taking the short 7.5 hour drive up to Indianapolis, IN for my second SQL Saturday in Indianapolis. I will be speaking on my favorite topic, Database Design, hoping to give at least a few people the secrets of how to design their database if so if I ever have to … Read more
I have a great interest in hierarchy solutions, as I plan to write a book on implementing hierarchies in SQL Server in the next year or so (after I see what happens in SQL Server vNext after 2017). Something I didn’t include in my design testing when I built my presentation on hierarchies (available from … Read more
In any real numeric data from a database , you are only rarely going to see any sort of normal distribution of the values. Sales data will rise and fall according to the time of year and the economic cycle. The date of input of a record will vary with the workload. If you plot … Read more
When you are developing an existing database, or demonstrating it, you nowadays need pseudonymised data, or even better, completely anonymized data. This data has to look right at first glance, and it needs to have the same distribution as the real data. Although we are yet to tackle continuous variables with complicated distributions such as … Read more
Coming up this weekend, I will be at my 10th SQL Saturday 729 in Louisville, KY. My topic will be row level security and dynamic data masking. Implementing Row Level Security in SQL Server Since the early days of SQL Server, it has been possible to use basic security measures to allow (and disallow) user … Read more
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