What is static data

Static data (aka Code, Lookup, List or Reference data), in the context of a relational database management system, is generally data that represents fixed data, that generally doesn’t change, or if it does, changes infrequently, such as abbreviations for US states for example e.g. ME, MA, NC. This data is typically referenced, extensively, by transactional type data. For example, an customer table would have references to static table for City name, State or province, Country, Payment terms e.g. NET 30 etc.

There has been a lot of buzz about Docker and containers this year, and earlier this Fall Microsoft released container support in Windows Server 2016. WinDocks is a team of former Microsoft engineers, and we released an independent port of Docker’s open source in March of 2016. Full disclosure, I am a co-founder at WinDocks.

In this article we’ll take a look at the basics of containers, and the most popular use by SQL Server DBAs.

Introduction

The Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA) is a new Experimental solution provided by Microsoft used to help upgrading databases from older SQL Server versions (MSSQL 2005 or higher versions) to the more recent ones (MSSQL 2012 or higher versions). It accomplished this based in a given workload that is previously captured from the source database and later replayed on the target SQL Server instances for comparison.

As DBAs, we all face a lot of challenges while performing the migration of SQL Server databases from one server to another or even the whole servers at some times. The Database Migration process is not always a simple Backup and Restore process so we might need a huge amount of effort if we have to migrate objects which are not included in the native backups for a specified database, these objects are called Non-Contained Objects.

Introduction

Visual Studio Code (Code), have you heard of this product yet? This is an open-source, cross-platform and extremely light weight code editor from Microsoft. You may see some folks explain this editor as the little brother to Visual Studio Community Edition (VS Community), but it is more compared to editors like Atom, Sublime Text or even Notepad++. It is not something you can use to compile program code, so it is for the less complex coding projects. I utilize Code as my editor of choice now with PowerShell, and even T-SQL at times. In this article, I wanted to walk you through using Code and note some specific extensions I use for PowerShell and SQL Server.

Receiving a comma delimited file is not new technology nor is it difficult to deal with in SQL Server. As a matter of fact, it is extremely easy. There are many cases as to why you would want to do this. For example, you have an external data source that needs to be imported into your database/table. There a couple ways to do this, however the quickest and easiest way is to use the native “import” feature within SQL Server Management Studio and you can even save it to an SSIS Package at the end of the process. The end result of using this method is that the external CSV file is loaded into a SQL Server table where columns are created and rows are populated.

The Java HashCode method is used to determine uniqueness or similarity of strings. While implemented in Java, there can be many benefits of creating a similar or customized version of this method.

Introduction

The main goal of many organizations, today, is reducing costs while maintaining the highest degree of stability and efficiency. To this end, we should think out of the box about how we can help to achieve this as DBAs. The approaches include:

A database

A SQL Server database can be thought of, in and of itself, as a data dictionary. It is self-describing, in that objects can be scripted into Data Definition Language aka DDL scripts to view all attributes, quickly and easily.