A Blog – Its importance & Why Every Business Needs One

In today’s digital world, every business needs a website. Modern business owners and managers understand the need to have a presence on the web. What is surprising, though, is the number of businesses that don’t leverage the power of a blog at all. Or, they have one, but they rarely update it. Here’s a look at what you are missing out on if you don’t make regular use of one.

A Blog Grows and Strengthens a Brand

A blog helps to build and strengthen a brand. Without one, building a brand can be an uphill struggle. It provides you with the opportunity to connect with customers and prospects and allows you to convey the ethos of your business. It also gives you a platform on which you can tell the stories that will create interest in the brand and foster brand loyalty.

It Fosters a Community

Blogs help you build a community around your brand. They can encourage feedback, reviews and comments. When you post relevant and engaging content, the community will grow. As more people subscribe to your blog, you will create a valuable list of people interested in your products, services, and your brand.

Blogging makes you an Authority in Your Sector

A business blog is a platform from which you can build your authority in your sector. You can show that not only you do you sell products or services, you are also experts in your field. You can post technical articles, tips and advice, and opinion pieces. This will gain the trust of readers.

A Blog Will Boost Your Search Engine Rankings

When you post content, you can target your profitable keywords and improve your position in search engine results. Good quality content posted regularly will make it much easier for people to find your website. Google favors websites that have fresh, relevant content. A website with a blog will always outperform a website without one.

Blogs Allow You to Post Timely Content

Modern content management systems like WordPress or Drupal make posting to a blog a simple task. It is usually something that you can do in-house. That means that you can react fast to industry trends and developments. You can post comments on current events and increase the relevancy of your brand. A blog allows you to demonstrate that you are at the forefront of your industry. 

Blogging Breeds Innovation

A hugely beneficial side-effect of producing regular content is that it breeds innovation within your organization. To write blog posts, you will need to keep updated with industry developments. You will need to research competitors and new technologies. The combination of research for new posts and the feedback you get on your blog will help you formulate new ideas for your business.

It Is an Integral Part of a Good Digital Marketing Strategy

A blog is an important part of a coherent digital marketing strategy. It can provide detailed information that is needed to turn lead into a sale.  Blog posts can contain a level of detail that you can’t have in social media posts. You can lead prospective customers from digital advertisements or social media posts to a re-enforcing blog post to a call to action at the end of a post.

Your Free Public Relations Platform

You can use a blog for PR purposes. You can announce new products, events or key appointments. Unlike some other PR platforms, you have full control over your this effective means of directly communicating with your audience. 

                  

Blogging Generates Leads 

People are more likely to subscribe to an informative blog than other types of mailing lists. If you produce useful content on a regular basis, you will soon start to see your mailing list grow. Once you have a list of subscribers, you can send them invitations to corporate events, details of special offers, and company news. Be sure, though, that you don’t overdo it, or you will start to lose subscribers.

A blog can be the foundation of a business’s marketing, PR and brand development. It can also be a very important part of the sales funnel. The business of blogging does, though, need to be taken seriously. The wrong type of content can backfire. If you post engaging content that is relevant to your brand image and the sector you operate in, a blog can indeed be a very powerful business marketing tool.

Dangerous command in SQL

SQL Server/Microsoft Data Platform professional with over 10 years of experience working in various fields such as financial, healthcare, and Manufacturing Domains. we have worked in various DB-related roles from database Modeler to database developer to Data Warehouse.

The most dangerous command in SQL

There’s one command, in particular, that has been effectively hidden since it was introduced pre-SQL Server 2000.

I present to you DBCC WRITEPAGE – the most dangerous command you can use in SQL Server.

Well, no danger of death 

DBCC WRITEPAGE allows you alter any byte on any page in any database, as long as you have sysadmin privileges. It also allows you to completely circumvent the buffer pool, in other words you can force page checksum failures.

The purposes of DBCC WRITEPAGE are:

1. To allow automated testing of DBCC CHECKDBand repair by the SQL Server team.
2. To engineer corruptions for demos and testing.
3. To allow for last-ditch disaster recovery by manually editing a live, corrupt database.

It’s not advised that you attempt #3 unless you’re confident you know what you’re doing and the side-effects on the Storage Engine from the byte(s) that you’re changing.

It is a very dangerous command because:

1. It is an entirely physical change to the page – nothing is logged in the transaction log, and it cannot be rolled back.
2. You can change any page in any database. For instance, you could use it to modify a page in master so that the instance immediately shuts down and will not start until the master is rebuilt and restored.
3. Anyone with sysadmin privileges can use it and there is no way to stop it.
4. It breaks the support of your database.

You can very easily shoot yourself in the foot very badly playing around with this command. This isn’t hyperbole – it’s just the truth.

bcc WRITEPAGE ({‘dbname’ | dbid}, filed, pageid, offset, length, data [, directORbufferpool])

The parameters mean:

• ‘dbname’ | dbid : self-explanatory
• fileid : file ID containing the page to change
• pageid : zero-based page number within that file
• offset : zero-based offset in bytes from the start of the page
• length : number of bytes to change, from 1 to 8
• data : the new data to insert (in hex, in the form ‘0xAABBCC’ – example three-byte string)
• directORbufferpool : whether to bypass the buffer pool or not (0/1)

DBCC WRITEPAGE does the following:

• Checkpoints the database and flushes all its pages out of the buffer pool
• Unhooks SQL Server’s FCB (File Control Block) from the data file
• Creates its own FCB for the file
• Does a direct read of the page into DBCC’s memory
• Modifies the page directly
• Writes the page directly to disk, bypassing the buffer pool and any page protection generation (i.e. not recalculating the page checksum)
• Fixes up the FCBs again

The syntax is:

12 3 4

DBCC TRACEON (2588);GO DBCC HELP (‘WRITEPAGE’); GO

If you’re going to play with it, please do not use it on a production system, and be very, very careful. It’s very easy to do something disastrous. And remember, if you use DBCC WRITEPAGE, you do so entirely at your own risk.