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Winding down
Normally I write these posts on a Friday evening. Sometimes it’s later than that, but always before Monday so that my editor can give it some attention before I publish. On Friday though, I spent half the day in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV and getting tested for several things to figure
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Just one more thing, an essay on troubleshooting
Over the weekend I watched — for the first time in my life — an episode of the long-running ABC and NBC police show Columbo, starring Peter Falk. I originally knew him from the film The Princess Bride (fun fact: I acted in a film directed by Buttercup herself, Robin Wright). I’ve been hearing a
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Choco upgrade, y’all
Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows, like the built-in package managers on Linux, and third-party ones on macOS like Homebrew and MacPorts. The idea is this: when you’re setting up a machine, you don’t want to have to think about which applications you need installed to get up and running. This could be a
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If I can’t use PWDENCRYPT, how am I supposed to use HASHBYTES?
For this week, here is a short post about reinventing the wheel. An interesting conversation happened on Twitter where Dave Dustin asked: “Does anybody have an example of using HASHBYTES() to replace PWDENCRYPT() per the documentation that the latter is deprecated?” – Dave Dustin Dave is referring to the Microsoft Docs page for PWDENCRYPT(), which
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On bias
Last week saw the second month of my employment at Microsoft. I admit that I’m enjoying my job, and I can’t deny that the reduced amount of time I’ve spent on social media has helped. Last week also saw the second user group meeting of 2022 for the Calgary Data User Group, which I co-founded
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A new book is on its way
I am thrilled to announce that Microsoft Press (Pearson) has agreed to let us do another Inside Out book this year. This news is so fresh I haven’t even gotten the advance yet! The working title is SQL Server 2022 Administration Inside Out, and we have most of the same cast and crew working on
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You can’t secure your network with spite
I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about not changing port 1433 for security reasons. I received this comment, which is not visible on that page because it warrants a lengthy response. I have redacted the name of the commenter. I disagree. Hundreds companies around the world were victims of ransomware attack even they
-> Continue reading You can’t secure your network with spite
How do I merge a small part of a Git repo into another repo?
At my new day job, one of the things we want to do is migrate a portion of a really large Git repository (over 20GB) which I’ll call LargeRepo, into a much smaller repository (< 2GB) which I’ll call SmallRepo, because when we commit new files to the larger one, the build process takes a
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Don’t change your default SQL Server port for security reasons
Since we’re on a recent theme of revising long-held best practices that are not, here’s a timely one for you: Don’t change your default SQL Server port for security reasons. In SQL Server Configuration Manager, you can set a custom port for your SQL Server instance. If you’re running named instances, you might even find
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The denial-of-service attack is coming from inside the house
A short post this week. While I was helping some friends recently, we experienced a curious thing where as soon as an application was started up, it was immediately followed by a denial-of-service attack that played out in the most mundane way you can imagine. The application itself is an API that is replacing the
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