iteration – sqlsunday.com

An alternative to data masking

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.

Finding primary key candidates

Probably one of the most common challenges I see when I do ETL and business intelligence work is analyzing a table (or a file) for possible primary keys. And while a bit of domain knowledge, along with a quick eye and some experience will get you really far, sometimes you may need some computational help just to be sure.

Here are some handy tricks to get you started!

A faster Fibonacci series in T-SQL

Fibonacci’s numbers are a sequence of numbers calculated using a recursion pattern that typically lends itself more to procedural programming. This makes it trickier to implement in a well-performing solution in T-SQL, as T-SQL is set-based.