I’ve been working on a little gadget for a while now, and today I finally got around to completing it and so now I’ve published it for everyone to try out. It’s a web API (wait, wait, don’t go away – it’s for database people!) that creates a randomized list of names, addresses, etc.
In this post, I’ll show you how easy it is to use this service to anonymize a development or test database so you don’t have all that personally identifiable information floating around.
Continue readingI just recently had the opportunity to sit with Aaron Nelson and go through some really cool Powershell features, and I’m certainly going to spend time getting to know Powershell a lot better. If you didn’t know, Powershell isn’t exclusive to Windows anymore – you can actually run a basic set of Powershell features, called Powershell Core, on Mac OS and Linux as well.
But there’s a problem.
Continue readingTypically, the advice on fill factor is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But occasionally, you’ll find a database or even a server with a crazy default setting that just fills your disk and buffer pool without any real benefit. Here’s a nifty script to rebuild any tables and indexes to a fill factor of 100%.
I like that there is a “Compare” function right out-of-the-box in Visual Studio, and even though many regular developers will choose to download a third-party application for the job, it’s perfectly fine for me.
Two problems: First off, I couldn’t find a straightforward way to open “compare” in the Visual Studio IDE without right-clicking an existing item in a source control repository. And second, wouldn’t it be cool if we could put a shortcut to it on the Windows “Send to” context menu?
Everyone has a script, a hack or a checklist they can’t function without. In this edition of T-SQL Tuesday, Bert Wagner challenged us to write about our favorite scripts. This is my take.
Here are 50 random numbers:
--- 50 random numbers WITH cte AS ( SELECT 0 AS i, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) AS n UNION ALL SELECT i+1, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) FROM cte WHERE i<50) SELECT * FROM cte;
And in SSMS, with the variable-width default font, the output looks… slightly-less-than-readable in the grid view:
We could use STR() to format the output, but the indent looks a little off:
--- 50 random numbers WITH cte AS ( SELECT 0 AS i, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) AS n UNION ALL SELECT i+1, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) FROM cte WHERE i<50) SELECT *, STR(n, 12, 2) AS with_str FROM cte;
Here’s something I’ve found: the space character is roughly about half the width of a typical number character. So replace every leading space with two spaces, and it will look really neat in the grid:
--- 50 random numbers
WITH cte AS (
SELECT 0 AS i, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) AS n
UNION ALL
SELECT i+1, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3)
FROM cte WHERE i<50)
SELECT *, STR(n, 12, 2) AS with_str,
REPLACE(STR(n, 12, 2), ' ', ' ') AS with_replace
FROM cte;
(and terrible everywhere else, obviously.)
Dynamic data masking is a neat new feature in recent SQL Server versions that allows you to protect sensitive information from non-privileged users by masking it. But using a brute-force guessing attack, even a non-privileged user can guess the contents of a masked column. And if you’re on SQL Server 2014 or earlier, you won’t have the option of using data masking at all.
Read on to see how you can bypass dynamic data masking, and for an alternative approach that uses SQL Server column-level security instead.
Scalar functions can be a real headache when you’re performance tuning. For one, they don’t parallelize. In fact, if you use a scalar function in a computed column, it will prevent any query that uses that table from going parallel – even if you don’t reference that column at all!
Encrypting your SQL Server’s TDS connections should be high on your list of things to do if you’re concerned with the privacy of your data. This often boils down to one big problem: can you get a valid certificate without paying a ton of money, and will it work with SQL Server?
So follow me down the rabbit hole, as we work out the steps to using Let’s Encrypt to create (and auto-renew!) a certificate for SQL Server. This is going to get technical.
Inspired by an actual customer scenario: what if you have a legacy app that doesn’t schema-prefix its database objects, but you want it to work with a specific assigned schema? There’s a quick and easy solution.
sqlsunday.com 