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Consider Molly Sims and her best friend Emese Gormley your new girlfriends on speed dial for all your pressing beauty and wellness needs. Is Botox a good idea? Should you try that new diet you saw on the Today Show? Molly and Emese have your back. With guests ranging from top health and beauty experts to their industry friends, you’ll get the scoop on the latest trends, which products and procedures to try, and which to run from-- and they just might be doing it all with a drink in hand. Prepare to be obsessed.
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Content provided by Voice of the DBA. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Voice of the DBA or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
There were less ransomware payments in the second half of 2024, according to research from cryptocurrency tracing firms. There were certainly some high profile attacks, but this matches with my impressions from talking with lots of fellow data professionals around the world. This article talks about the trend, and speculates that law enforcement actions may have had some effect. My guess is that this is likely a temporary decrease as there are no shortage of criminals and so many tools are available on the Internet, especially the dark web. The idea of writing a piece of software to encrypt files isn’t complex, and we’ve had people writing viruses for years. I suspect there are no shortage of smaller criminal organizations and individuals that will step in to continue attacks in the future. Whether that will be a lot of attacks or a few, I don’t know. One of the other problems is that so many organizations are loathe to disclose they’ve been hacked if they don’t have to do so. Lots of them would prefer to just pay a ransom and get back to work. I don’t know how many IT pros agree with that, though often the employees just want to get past the attack as quickly as possible and restore their systems. I know that they often worry about future attacks, but I also wonder if many IT pros know how to check their systems to be sure the malicious software is gone. Securing your environment is hard, especially when most users (and IT people) want convenience. Many infrastructure people want to log in with a single account and get things done. Or they want an easy way to switch accounts when necessary, which isn’t always convenient. Some of us are used to the runas command, but I’ve met many people who aren’t. I do like that much of the world is moving to using managed identities or service accounts for processes, known accounts for CI/CD that can handle deploying code while each of us just approves the deployment with our own credentials rather than directly moving bits. I am glad to see more and more people without rights to log into production, only to submit batches to a system to run and get results sent back. All of those are good things which can prevent an infection from a website or email from spreading to production systems. However, we still have lots of interconnections between systems for important data stored outside of relational systems. Even storage explorer type access for Delta/parquet files can be a problem if you have that. Databases are safer from ransomware, assuming you can lock down all OS/file system access. Maybe we ought to store more data in databases, even those crazy Excel/Word/etc. documents as binary files. I’m OK with that, as long as we have a separate instance for those files. I have no desire to see more binary files stored in my OLTP database, or even on the same instance. Steve Jones Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify , or iTunes . Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.…
SQL Server on Linux was released with version 2017. Since then, I’ve seen some deployments of SQL Server on Linux, but many of the customers I work with still deploy SQL Server on Windows. While there are limitations and unsupported features, most of what we need is available in SQL Server on Linux. I assume most of you out there work on Windows machines against Windows servers. Maybe some of you run containers, but that’s likely a minority. Windows seems to have won the desktop and for most of us running SQL Server, the server room as well. However, if you use containers, you likely use Linux ones since SQL Server isn’t supported on Windows containers . I know I do, and I like them, but overall, I find I need to know very little Linux to do my job, or even work with the containers. I like Linux. As someone who learned Unix early on and installed Linux 0.8, I thought at one point I’d spend most of my career in that world. Especially as I worked with DOS and Windows 3.1 in corporate work and found them much less capable. I still remember writing grep.bat and awk.bat files to duplicate some of the things I did in Unix on DOS machines. For doing database work, most platforms are ported to Windows, but even if you connect to an Oracle/PostgreSQL/MySQL/MongoDB/etc. system running on Linux, do you need much linux? I find that ls, pwd, and cat get me through most of the things I need to do. When there’s something more complex, like sudo systemctl restart mssql-server, there are plenty of code snippets in the docs or some website. These days, you could even ask an AI how to do many simple tasks. If you don’t use Linux, then you don’t need any, but if you deal with any sort of system running on Linux, how much is important to know? What’s your top ten list of things a newbie should learn? Let us know today. Steve Jones Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify , or iTunes . Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.…
I don’t know how many of you will be disappointed or impacted by this, but Azure Data Studio (ADS) is being retired, as of 6 Feb, 2025. It will be supported for a little over a year, until 28 Feb, 2026. On one hand I’m not surprised, and on the other, I’m a little shocked by this. I have written a number of articles on ADS , and shown how things work, as well as pointed out a number of things that don’t work well in the product or its extensions. These pieces have gotten a number of reads, and people have commented on them, so I wonder if there are a lot of you that are upset by this. Is this going to change the way you work? I will say that it will lightly change my work, as I do use ADS to connect to PostgreSQL, but not so much for SQL Server. I have tried to use ADS, but I just don’t like it. I don’t have a good reason, as it does a lot of what I need from a query tool. I think the port of the query and result experience from a real app like SSMS or Enterprise Manager or even isql/w is just a worse experience. I don’t like the ADS interface and it’s annoying to me. I suspect that many others feel the same way (other views from Deb and Kevin) . They don’t like the ADS experience and prefer SSMS or some other tool. I know there’s been no shortage of complaints over the years about, and finally MS has listened. From first trying to get everyone to leave SSMS to forcing people to install ADS alongside SSMS and now to finally retiring the tool. I think it’s a good decision as people don’t want to lose SSMS and it’s hard to maintain two tools. We will still have VS Code, which I use often for other purposes. I haven’t spent much time with the mssql extension, but I need to as it’s been updated as of a few months ago and supposedly works better now. We’ll see. In the meantime, I won’t mourn ADS. It was a tool that had potential. I liked the idea of notebooks, I liked the fast startup. I just wish it were better implemented as a run-a-query-and-get-results application. I wish we had a cross platform editor that was simple and fast, but not one based on VSCode. One that’s written to just manage queries. Maybe they’ll rewrite isql/w in a modern way and port it to Linux. Steve Jones Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify , or iTunes . Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.…
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