Effective permissions on SQL Server

SQL Server Management Studio allows you to view effective permissions on an object, but it’s limited in a few important respects. To work around some of those limitations, I’ve built a stored procedure to display all the defined and effective permissions across an entire SQL Server database.

Directed acyclic graphs vs parent-child hierarchies

We’ve recently looked at ways to work with parent-child hierarchies, particularly in reporting scenarios. Regular parent-child hierarchies are great when working with dimensions that are ragged, but they have a critical limitation – any given node in the tree can only have a single parent node. A great solution to this problem is a DAGdirected acyclic graph.