Almost every time that I attend an event, I'll end up meeting someone that has had security issues at their company. I'm always surprised how many people have had ransomware or other security problem that didn't get well publicized. It's not like everyone has had one, but out of 100 people, it seems there is at least one issue.

Many of us work with third-party companies for either products or services. It's become standard to use other firms for specific things your organization needs. However, since that's the practice, many of those firms you partner with have their own partners. After all, they're using other companies for specialized work just like you are.

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One of the very common expectations from many SQL developers involves transactions. Many developers (database or application developers) think they can open a transaction, do something, open an inner transaction (nested), and then commit or rollback the inner transaction separate from the outer one.

If you've worked with explicit transactions and experimented with this a bit, then you know that this doesn't work. Recently Brent Ozar wrote a post on this as he had a client think that committing the inner transaction would release locks. It doesn't.

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Security has become better and better in many organizations. At the same time, hackers and malicious actors are doing a better and better job of finding new ways to attack systems. Some work to target specific individuals, often because of government or industrial espionage. Most of us aren't likely to deal with those issues, unless we work with (or are) someone that is very important in a particular situation.

Instead, many of us deal with wider spread attacks that look to exploit vulnerabilities in technology or humans at scale, hoping to find the weak links. Lots of people I know have dealt with viruses in the past that shut down systems, and more recently, had to rebuild systems crippled by ransomware.  Despite their best efforts, this often means lots of extra unexpected work, combined with the stress of falling behind on our commitments. We have plenty of other work to do.

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The short answer is no.

The longer answer is it depends, and perhaps to be more complete, ChatGPT likely will help us produce the simple, tedious queries with much less effort.

There has been a lot of news about AI and ChatGPT and how well it performs for a computer. That last phrase is important because while it's impressive, I don't know that any of us would consider ChatGPT to be in our list of the Top 5 Dream Dinner Guests. The tool isn't that impressive compared to most people, especially our friends.

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There's a common party question about which 5 people would you invite to a dinner party? Often this is amended to include living or dead people, and it's often interesting to hear people tell you who they'd invite and why.

Since most of the people reading this work in technology in some way, I was wondering who you would invite to a party that's related to technology. Living or dead, however tangential, is there a list you can come up with?

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In the past, many businesses hired employees whose role was deciding which prices to charge for their goods or services. At one point, organizations largely set prices based on their costs, though over time they tend to look at their competitors and set similar prices. If, however, management from multiple companies went into a room and determined prices, this would be price-fixing.

Price fixing is illegal. In many countries, we would not allow different companies to work together in a way that might reduce competition or take advantage of consumers. However, that might be a struggle in the future as we find companies using various services to help them manage their systems.

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Many of us work inside an organization that has a process for building and deploying software. We may find our org doing this well, or we may feel our process is poor with lots of room for improvement.

A lot of the discussion around how to be better at building software in the last ten years has been around the philosophy of DevOps. This concept doesn't really prescribe how to build software, but give you goals to aim for. That means you still need to take the ideas of flow, feedback, and learning and decide how you implement them with your staff. What practices do you follow to ensure you can deploy quickly anytime your code is done? These can include ensuring you've tested code, getting feedback from customers, and more.

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Basecamp (formerly 37 Signals) is quitting the cloud. One of the founders gives some reasons, and he had some detail in a tweet on what they've spent in the cloud the last few years. Over USD$3mm on various services, though their costs in search seem very high. I don't, and haven't, run as busy a business as they do, so I don't know if they've truly done a good job architecting things and setting up services. They say they have, though I'd expect everyone to say and think that.

However, I'll assume they are correct and they can't optimize things any more than they are currently. Their decision makes some sense, and I agree with it. I've been surprised at the growth of the cloud, both in size and how quickly people are moving to the cloud. I've also been saying for years that if you have a steady or known workload, the cloud is likely very expensive.

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I saw this tweet recently, where Richie Rump asked what has changed in T-SQL since the SQL Server 2012 version. A few people from Microsoft responded that there were changes in all versions, and while I think some versions have few changes, I decided to look.

SQL Server 2012 introduced the window functions with the OVER() clause to SQL Server. This was a huge change in that many aggregate queries were much easier to write without needing complex GROUP BY lists and subqueries or unions to join together different data. While I'm not an expert by any means, I find lots of queries for reporting easier to write with the window functions, and I've grown to enjoy using these in code.

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One of the challenges for me when working with customers is getting them to think about how to change their software process. Often they want to solve their problems, but no one wants to alter the way they work. Whether that's the protocol for capturing code or managing servers, it seems that changing the way we work is hard for many people. They want everyone else to change. Or they want a magic tool that solves problems without them changing the way they work.

Unfortunately, I'm not a magician.

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