This is just a fancy way of saying you need to be better friends with who ever is managing your enterprise firewall. I hadn’t had to touch the DTC until a recent vendor insisted their application wouldn’t work without it (despite their only having a single data store). The MSDTC was developed to coordinate transactions that would span multiple machines and was originally introduced in SQL Server 2000. In theory it’s not super complicated: just enable the DTC service/communication on the servers in question and turn on some built in firewall rules on the servers right?

Last week was a very excellent PASS Summit (made somewhat bittersweet by the fact that we don’t know exactly when we’ll return to Seattle) and I wanted to captures some of the things I brought back from a high level. Big SQL News A couple of announcements of note were made the first of which being the promotion of SQL 2019 to GA. 2019 includes such fancy features as the ability to perform data classification via metadata tables (as opposed to attaching that information to a columns extended properties).

CosmosDB really is an amazing datastore and even better (you might be thinking): Microsoft handles the backups for you. Which is true. They take backups every four hours and keep the last two. If you need anything recovered from the database you’d better hope that you notice with in that window and get a ticket open with Microsoft to get it fixed. This being the case Microsoft helpfully recommends that in addition to the by default backups that come with the Cosmos DB service that you export your data to a secondary location as needed to meet your organizations SLA.

I had the wonderful opportunity to present an introduction to data catalogs to the Denver SQL Users Group yesterday. I am grateful for the chance to work on my presenting skills and talk about the new challenges about identifying and protecting risky data. I’ve uploaded the slide deck and some sample PowerShell scripts for SQL Data Catalog to my git repo here. Additionally there was a question about re-using Data Catalog work for data masking: Richard Macaskill’s blog post I mentioned is here.

I had an interesting question asked this last Saturday when I was giving my Intro to SQL session at SQL Saturday Redmond: “What happens if you cast a NVARCHAR string as VARCHAR?” I had an educated guess but I didn’t have the time during the session to test it out: Casting NVARCHAR to VARCHAR. It won’t throw an error but it will destroy any data in the string that isn’t VARCHAR compatible.

I’ll be presenting my introduction to SQL queries in just a few short days at SQL Saturday Redmond! If you know somebody that’s just getting started with SQL and is wants an introduction to how to query and join tables: have I got a session for you! (It’s this one.) This will be my first time presenting away from my home turf of Spokane so I’m only a little nervous about it: I hope I see you there!