I'm sure that we all know that SQL Server includes all sorts of interesting functionality to allow us to encrypt our data and like with all encryption techniques, that data is encrypted using keys. In SQL Server we've got a number of different keys, we've got the Service Master Key, Database Master Keys, Symmetric... Continue Reading →
I thought I'd give you all a little preview of our latest offering, the Undercover Catalogue which should be available in Preview version very soon. So what actually is it? The Undercover Catalogue will help you to build up a picture of your entire SQL infrastructure. It'll go out, discover and interrogate all of your... Continue Reading →
I was having a cleanup of some old scripts the other day when I stumbled upon a script I wrote some time ago. I remember writing the script because from time to time I would get asked if I can restore a copy of a specific database to a particular point in time... Continue Reading →
A couple of times recently I've seen the question asked, 'How can I select a single row at random from a table?'. There are often a few ways of doing this suggested, most seem to rely using CTEs or temp tables. I thought I'd share, in a quick post a very simple and easy way... Continue Reading →
This months T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Bert Wagner , you can find the invitation for this months topic here. Bert has a great topic for this month, he wants us to write about code you’ve written that you would hate to live without. I have found the SQL server community to be extremely helpful... Continue Reading →
I've been having a little play around with AWS recently and was looking at S3 (AWS' cloud storage) when I thought to myself, I wonder if it's possible to backup up an on premise SQL Server database directly to S3? When we want to backup directly to Azure, we can use the 'TO URL' clause... Continue Reading →
Sometimes emails from SQL Server go missing, especially when you share an inbox with colleagues. On most occasions it doesn't always matter as the job that generated the email can simply be re ran to produce the email once again, but what about those emails that contain time specific information? we cannot simple just kick... Continue Reading →
Now this is something that I've seen asked a few times and it's always a question that gets a fair number of different answers. How do we go about converting a positive number to a negative, or the other way around? I'll give you my solution and it uses a little bit of bitwise logic.... Continue Reading →
Have you ever had the need to give elevated permissions via a stored procedure above that what the user calling the procedure might have? Perhaps you've got a table in your database that contains top secret information and you only want that information to be accessed by via a proc, you're users are denied access... Continue Reading →
