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Organizations are creating and managing more data than ever. As stewards of this data, we are tasked with ensuring that it is highly available, secure from threats, and only accessible to those that it is intended for.

This session dives into the many areas that keep security officers awake at night, including: • Principle of least privilege • Data governance • Data compliance laws and regulations • Common exploits • Security best practices for developers • Encryption • Industry-specific security guidelines

As data platforms grow and evolve, the benefit of centralizing and standardizing security solutions is greater than ever. The frequency of data breaches has increased over time, and despite continuing to improve our security posture, the complexity and effectiveness of attacks continues to keep pace.

Data security is a key implementation of risk management. All organizations are targeted by cyber threat actors. Success is dissuading those malicious parties from persisting in their attacks. Knowing how to effectively layer security and create effective access methods between users and data will provide the highest chances of success given an ever-changing threat landscape.

Please note that we will be using Microsoft Teams for the online portion of this meeting. You may want to join a few minutes early to ensure you do not have any issues. If you are attending in person, there are large TVs at the office, and you do not need to bring a laptop or use Teams.

As AI adoption increases rapidly and organizations clamor to take advantage of OpenAI, Copilot, and other powerful tools, many mistakes and oversights are made. These mistakes manifest themselves in security breaches, invalid results, and even offensive content. The immediate results are lost time, money, and embarrassment. What do these problems have in common? Bad data!

Quality AI solutions require clean, documented, and validated data. This session dives into data quality with a strong focus on how data is maintained as it moves from transactional to analytic workloads.

Some topics include: • How transactional data be maintained effectively without compromising performance. • The importance of documentation in ensuring data is used correctly. • How to validate data as it is moved, transformed, and crunched. • Security implications of handing off data to AI applications. • Ensuring that a source-of-truth exists for each data source.

This is a fast-paced session that promises both helpful best practices and also some fun along the way.

Please note, this event is live streamed to YouTube. You can also connect with Teams, if you RSVP. YouTube link is available without registration and will be found on https://youtube.com/c/transmokopter/streams

There is a common need in analytics and reporting to aggregate data based on date attributes. These may include weekdays, holidays, quarters, or specific times of the year. Crunching these metrics on-the-fly can be slow and inefficient.

Calendar tables allow the complex conversions, definitions, and date-related metadata to be calculated ahead of time and stored in a static, reliable structure. We can then use this table to avoid the need to perform any date math on the fly. This not only saves time and computing resources, but also allows more complex analytics to be performed that would otherwise be very challenging. Equally important, code becomes more maintainable as date calculations are performed once in a single location, rather than repeatedly throughout an application.

This session speeds through the design, implementation, and use of calendar tables, providing demos along the way of their creation and use.

Please join us on 17th April 2024 to listen to the topic: All About SQL Injection

What \~ Toronto Data Professionals Community (Virtual) When \~ Wednesday 17th April 2024

Agenda:

• 6:00 PM Networking and Introduction
• 6:15 PM Topic: All About SQL Injection with Ed Pollack
• 7:30 PM End

Where: Online via Microsoft team

Session Details: SQL injection has consistently ranked as one of the top security threats in software development. Businesses have experienced massive data breaches and have even been forced to close as a result of security holes related to SQL injection. Proactive solutions are key to preventing SQL injection and ensuring that hackers don't see your application as an easy target. We will demonstrate common mistakes that lead to SQL injection and a variety of ways which can safeguard our data against attacks. While illustrating the ways in which hackers probe and attack our systems, we will show that SQL injection is not only the result of bad TSQL, but also bad code. By securing our data from the application and database tiers, we can greatly decrease their attractiveness to hackers and prevent attacks that could cripple a business permanently.

Speaker Bio: Ed Pollack is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP with a passion for learning how the Microsoft Data Platform works and sharing that knowledge with the community. His experiences in data architecture, database design, performance optimization, and data security are motivation for public speaking, writing, coding, and other community activities. Ed has spoken at SQL Saturday events, SQL Bits, PASS Summit, EightKB, and many other regional and international events. Ed is the organizer of the Capital Area SQL Server Group and SQL Saturday Albany, as well as a co-organizer of SQL Saturday New York City, and Future Data Driven. He has published a number of books, including "Dynamic SQL: Applications, Performance, and Security in Microsoft SQL Server", "Expert Performance Indexing in Azure SQL and SQL Server 2022", and "Analytics Optimization with Columnstore Indexes in Microsoft SQL Server: Optimizing OLAP Workloads". Ed is also an active contributor of content to SimpleTalk. In his free time, Ed enjoys video games, traveling, cooking exceptionally spicy foods, and hanging out with his amazing wife and sons.

Greetings once again, data enthusiasts!

Our April meeting is scheduled for Monday, April 8th, at 5:30 pm! We will meet in person at: Rensselaer Chamber of Commerce, 90 4th Street, Troy, NY.

Please RSVP here if you are attending so we can purchase an appropriate amount of food for everyone. Food will be pizza from the always-excellent DeFazio's!

Our meeting schedule is as follows:

• 5:30 PM: Food, soft drinks, and networking
• 6:15 PM: Chapter news and announcements
• 6:30 PM: Presentation

We usually wrap up between 7:30 PM and 8:00 PM.

This month, we are assembling a short list of locally-presented talks, all aimed to be 30mins or less each. I am going to throw my hat in the ring to get this list going, and I will add additional talks as they are confirmed:

Ed Pollack: All About Partitioning in SQL Server (20mins) Ray Kim: Breaking the Ice: Ways to Initiate Networking (15mins)

This will differ from our roundtable discussions as they will be more formalized presentations, but they can be short. Even if you have a topic that only requires 5 or 10 or 15 minutes, feel free to let me know! Similarly, if you have a topic but would prefer to not present, I'll find a willing victim (volunteer) to take up the task :-)

With each version of SQL Server, more features become available that allow for data or metadata to reside in memory. These improvements can greatly reduce contention, improve query performance, and reduce the computational overhead of frequently executed T-SQL. This session discusses different features that allow for the use of memory-optimized data and the ideal use-cases for each. Topics include:

• Memory-optimized tables
• Natively-compiled stored procedures • Memory-optimized TempDB metadata
• Memory-optimized table variables
• Memory-optimized table-valued parameters
• Data durability
• And more!

Effective use of memory-optimized data structures can greatly reduce locking, latching, blocking, and other common hallmarks of OLTP contention. This session will help you take control of your most critical and time-sensitive transactional processes by taking full advantage of memory-optimized data in SQL Server!