-
Thoughts on Data Masking
Often times, production data needs to be moved to different environments for testing/developing purposes. However, some of that data can be people’s name, birthday, address, account number, etc., that we don’t want testers and/or developers to see, due to privacy and regulatory concerns. Hence the need to mask those data. I can certainly see this…
-
Random oddity
Recently I wrote a program to reshuffle data in a csv file. And I ran into a problem with Random in C#. Let’s look at the following program. One would think that it should print 5 integers, randomly picked between 0 and 8. But no, in almost all cases, the program prints the same integer…
-
Sql Server database mirroring automatic failover verification
Starting with Sql Server 2005, Sql Server provides an interesting high availability option at individual database level, called database mirroring. When configured in high availability mode (principal, mirror, and witness), provided that: 1. Failover Partner information is supplied in the connection string; 2. Application code knows to retry database operations; then automatic fail over will…
-
Why we fight — US government movie during World War II
I’ve read a couple of history books lately. Chinese history overall, especially the period since the mid 19th century, is fascinating to me. American history is also of great interest. I am currently working on an American history book. Anyway, I noticed a series of US military propaganda movies on Netflix, made during World War…
-
Notes on analyzing a user minidump with WinDbg
One of my students’ Sql Server 2000 SP4 crashed. I volunteered to see if I could get anything out of it by looking at the dump file with WinDbg. A few notes: 1. The processor or Windows version that the dump file was created on does not need to match the platform on which WinDbg…