Here are a few of my predictions based on my experiences over the last few months. First. Azure Data Catalog is going to be massive in the near future (18 months). The (hopefully) future integration with the new SQL Data Discovery and Classification is going to help massively with GDPR. Secondly, Chris Webb is going to become very popular. With Azure Analysis Service, the big question is optimize or scale. The killer feature for any monitoring tool aimed at the BI market is going to have to answer that question....

In the old days, you would have to throw money at a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) who would sell you a SSL certificate. The alternative was to self-sign or use someone like cacert, the problem is out-of-the-box, no browser\OS supports this so you get a security warning, which isn’t something you want when your trying to be secure. StartCom, was a trusted CA who issued free SSL certificates. Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox all trusted StartCom which means you could get a free SSL certificate without the warnings....

Another day, another source of bad data. This time, it was a CSV. As you can see, the format changes mid file. This makes importing tricky. The way I tend to handle importing into SQL is to create staging tables with all the columns defined as varchar, then, once its imported into SQL, then convert it. The problem occurs when you try to determine the number of columns required. Traditionally, we let the system auto determine how many columns we have, and if we have headers, define the names, unfortunately because the format changes we can’t do this otherwise it will ignore the additional columns - assuming the first row doesn’t contain all the columns....

Serverless doesn’t somehow make your code run without physical servers. You still need servers, it’s just your treating your servers like you would code. However, it goes beyond just infrastructure as code (IaaS), it’s utilizing the cloud. Let’s get something clear, the cloud is nothing more than someone else’s server and for this post, I’m defining the cloud as any service provider who allows you run compute by the millisecond. The reason the cloud is such a major thing is that it allows you to treat commodity hardware as a commodity....

Another day, another Twitter awesome moment, Parikshit Savjani was explaining how backups are now faster in SQL Server 2017. How we made backups faster with SQL Server 2017 https://t.co/NNf5cLuBJx — Parikshit Savjani (@talktosavjani) November 23, 2017 For more info on how, read his post. TD;LR - The wait time before data is actually copied is reduced because the amount of buffers to scan is massively reduced. “…requires only 250 buffers to scan as opposed to 500 Million buffers with former algorithm…”...

One of the annoying things about AWS S3 is the error messages. Below is an error, see if you can figure out what it’s saying. I’ll give you a hint. We’ve connected and authenticated. Here is another hint, we can read from that bucket. Give up? It’s permissions. Incorrect AWS keys returns a helpful message, so does invalid bucket, as does no access to read bucket

So the NHS Hack Day retweet this We're a UK non-profit dedicated to open source in Healthcare. Can anyone help us with some VPS instances? @rackspaceUK @digitalocean @linode — NHoS (@_nhos_) April 30, 2017 Which made me think why is Ubuntu creating a NHS specific distro (OS) and why are they begging for some VPS instances? Turns out, it has nothing to do with either Ubuntu or the NHS. Its a group of people building on-top of Ubuntu, aimed at the NHS....

Idempotent – something that is repeatable, that remains unchanged in value when repeatedly executed either independently or on by itself. SSRS – SQL Server Reporting Services part of Microsoft SQL Server. Used to deliver static reports that can be viewed via a web browser and exported to a number of formats including Excel, PDF and CSV. SSAS – SQL Server Analysis Services part of Microsoft SQL Server. SSIS – SQL Server Integration Services part of Microsoft SQL Server....

I’ve been thinking lately about how the web industry needs to change in order to improve. Cyber attacks appears to be on the rise and alot of the time they appear to be caused by someone doing something silly. Perhaps this is because everyone is a web developer, it certainly isn’t down to lack of available resources on the matter. Thinking positively about cyber security, the card companies banded together to form PCI-DSS – Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, with the goal to help businesses process card payments securely and reduce card fraud....

One of those annoying things about the US is they use different paper sizes to us Brits. US Letter is 215.9 by 279.4 mm (8.5 by 11.0 inches) The UK equivalent, A4, is 210 by 297 mm (8.26 by 11.69 inches) One of our customers is based in the UK but has remote sales offices in the US, so their SSRS report are set to A4 and when they printed them in the US offices, the footer is cut off....

Today’s Windows Insider email included a few new cool features, here are my Top 3 Do more at once with the new Compact Overlay window. Keep watching a movie or video chat on one corner of your screen — even when switching apps to check email or browse the web. When an app window enters compact overlay mode, it’ll be shown above other windows so it won’t get blocked. Look for updates to the Movies & TV app and Skype Preview app to take advantage of this feature in the near future....

If you ever need a lesson in the importance of picking a good domain registrar, then read about [email protected] recent problems. Dear [email protected] participants, We — like many of you who have contacted us — have been extremely frustrated by the long project downtime. We (bakerlab.org) had a domain name registration verification lapse, and our registrar (dotster.com) and ICANN turned off DNS for bakerlab.org. We went through the steps to...

WordPress is an amazing blogging platform. However it does require a fair amount of love. Despite Mythic Beasts managing a large portion of my stack (hardware, OS, Apache, PHP, MySQL) and WordPress having automatic background updates I still find myself logging in and finding pending updates for WordPress. The solution was WP-CLI. With the shell add-on, I SSH onto my account, then What the above script does is download WP-CLI, grant it execute permission, then downloads my script and again, gives it execute permission....

I’ve been getting errors with MSSQL server on Ubuntu on Windows 10. The error, Failed to connect to bus: No such file or directory dpkg: error processing package mssql-server (–remove): subprocess installed post-removal script returned error exit status 1 Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.23-0ubuntu5) … E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I managed to fix it in the end by Of course, you should try uninstalling correctly first, which is latter of the two...

Been trying to find out the following from my local council: How many resident parking permits have been issued How many resident parking bays are available What exactly has the money been spent on in terms of fines issued. To say they are being evasive is an understatement. So far, I’ve got, the response of: _This info is fluid as it is not only static residents who can apply for waivers within a given zone but also agencies who provide medical needs and other statutory services....

So once again we have another major security leak. You can read about it, here and below is the email CEO Matthew Prince wrote to customers: Dear Cloudflare Customer: Thursday afternoon, we published a blog post describing a memory leak caused by a serious bug that impacted Cloudflare’s systems. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read that post on the bug: https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-caused-by-cloudflare-parser-bug/ While we resolved the bug within hours of it being reported to us, there was an ongoing risk that some of our customers’ sensitive information could still be available through third party caches, such as the Google search cache....

Caching always seems to cause problems, still, we can’t have it all. Today’s caching problem was to do with Redgate SQL Prompt, a really amazing plugin that helps you write better SQL code. The problem with it is the cache of database object metadata was out-of-date. I had updated a table so when I typed select * then press TAB to expand the * into a list of columns, I got the old names....

I’ve had a problem recently when it can to formatting a datetime as just date where FormatDateTime didn’t work The fix was to change it to Format. Oddly, despite the parameter being a datetime, I found I still had to cast it as a date. FormatDateTime was introduced in Vs 2008. I’m not 100% sure why this didn’t work.

Another error I hit Warning 1 [rsRuntimeErrorInExpression] The Value expression for the textrun ‘Textbox28.Paragraphs[0].TextRuns[0]’ contains an error: Overload resolution failed because no Public ‘/’ can be called with these arguments: ‘Public Shared Operator /(d1 As Decimal, d2 As Decimal) As Decimal’: Argument matching parameter ‘d2’ cannot convert from ‘TextBoxImpl’ to ‘Decimal’. C:\Projects\Reports\1. Report.rdl Thankfully Google found Qiuyun answer. I was missing the .Value at the end. So (wrong) =ReportItems!Textbox1 Fixed (working)...

In case you haven’t heard, I’ve started a new job and one of my first tasks was to speed up a SSRS report. One of the first issues I stumbled across was this: An error occurred during local report processing. The definition of the report ‘/1. Report’ is invalid. The Value expression for the textrun ‘Tx412.Paragraphs[0].TextRuns[0]’ contains an error: [BC30456] ‘RdlObjectModel’ is not a member of ‘ReportingServices’ Looking into it the issue it appears its expanded expressions when it got copied – it’s basically making the it fully qualified....

For the past 4 months I’ve been using Visual Studio 2015 rather then Visual Studio 2013 and yesterday, I hit a bug with SSRS (shows how much I love SSRS). The bug appeared when it came to deployment The error was deploying SSRS report Exception calling “CreateCatalogItem” with “7” argument(s): “The definition of this report is not valid or supported by this version of Reporting Services. The report definition may have been created with a later version of Reporting...

I recently had incident logged where the drive that hosted SSISDB database filled up on the UAT environment. We had SSISDB set to only keep 2 copies of the projects, however the additional copies are only removed when the SQL job is run – SSIS Server Maintenance job. The SQL job is scheduled to run at 00:00 (midnight) every day, which is the default, which runs two steps SSIS Server Operation Records Maintenance...

I was re-entering my password into our NowTV box in the bedroom when it occurred to me. Authentication sucks on the Internet of Things (IoT). The problem is you have a simple device with minimal extras. On the NowTV you have a basic remote that looks like this: Can you imagine entering a password with a length of over 20 that’s a mixture of numbers, special characters and both upper and lower case characters?...

Distribution list are amazing things, they allow us to send mail to our team without having to remember who exactly is in our team, this is especial true in this modern age where we are part of many different teams, sometimes without even realising. These lists can contain hundreds or even thousands of members and the latest NHS IT bug has left IT departments maybe wanting to double-check their distribution lists – hopefully before the security team comes a knocking....

This is absolutely amazing, Microsoft, running SQL Server, in Linux Redhat (RHEL)!