Simple SQL Server automated user auditing

January 25, 2016 by

As a DBA I am often asked to provide lists of all active users ID’s or groups for a specific server or database. In addition to this, I am also asked to provide a list of failed logins. These requests are frequent enough that I decided to automate the process of gathering this data and […]

Removing the risk from important maintenance tasks in SQL Server

January 18, 2016 by

As database professionals, we are often in very close proximity to important processes, data, and applications. While we adopt the mantra of “Do no harm”, many maintenance or reporting tasks that we create carry unseen risks associated with them. What happens when a drive fills up during daily differential backups? What if an index rebuild […]

SQL Server non-clustered indexes with included columns

January 11, 2016 by

SQL Server indexes are created to speed up the retrieval of data from the database table or view. The index contains one or more columns from your table. The structure of these keys are in the shape of B-tree distribution, enabling SQL Server to find the data quickly.

Tips and tricks for SQL Server database maintenance optimization

January 11, 2016 by

Database maintenance is very important, a critical part of our database administrators’ daily tasks. However, this aspect is frequently underestimated which could lead to performance problems and respectively angry, unhappy customers. In this article, we will take a look at the different maintenance operations we have in SQL Server and how we can optimize them […]

Data boundaries: Finding gaps, islands, and more

January 6, 2016 by

One of the more difficult challenges we face when analyzing data is to effectively identify and report on boundaries. Data sets can contain any number of significant starting and stopping points that may indicate significant events, such as missing data, important business events, or actionable changes in usage. Regardless of the use case, knowing how […]

Creating a gap in sequences – TSQL Stored Procedure advisor

January 6, 2016 by

Introducing the Problem Gaps existence in automatic sequenced columns occurs all the time. Missing identity values (or other sequencing values) occur for a variety of Reasons. The most common reasons include: roll backed transactions, failed inserts and Deletes, large row deletes after delete commands that occur after many inserts to a sequenced table and so […]

Creating a SQL Injection protection function

December 9, 2015 by

The Problem The Problem demonstrated here describes a very common scenario. The IT Security group orders all programmers that all the dynamic input strings that comes from user input to be checked for suspicious SQL injection intentions. SQL injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications. During the attack, malicious SQL statements […]

7 Neat tricks to better safeguard a SQL database

November 3, 2015 by

Every organization, whether large or small, imposes some security measures to protect its confidential data. Such data usually includes contract details, project planning reports, employee information, financial account details and more. More often than not, firewalls, anti-viruses, and other data security techniques are applied to keep unauthorized users or programs from accessing such sensitive company […]

How to connect our C# application in Azure

October 30, 2015 by

Azure is a simple and cheap way to have a Database. You can rent your Azure Database of 2 GB per 5 USD per month. That is a very cheap price. You can also administer your Database from your Android or your iPhone, which is very interesting. It is also possible to create your Windows […]

How to work with Visual Studio and VM databases in Azure

September 24, 2015 by

Introduction In this new article, we will use Visual Studio to connect to a SQL Server Database Installed in a Virtual Machine in Azure. Visual Studio is one of the most popular development tools in the world and connecting to Azure with Visual Studio is a very common need. We will modify an existing SQL […]

Azure Blob Storage – Literally a Hybrid database deployment

August 4, 2015 by

In continuation to our hybrid deployment series, we will check few more options in order to integrate on-premises and Azure, using of course SQL Server. In the last article we talked about Azure Blob Storage and how to use this service to store a SQL Server database entirely there. Meaning that we can have our […]