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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
We all go to great lengths to make sure that our databases are secure (or at least I really hope that we do), we make sure that only authorised users have access and then only to the databases and levels that they need. We're careful that all our passwords conform to crazy complexity rules. We're... Continue Reading →
Here's a quickie that I've just stumbled across. I've just tried to initiate a manual failover of an availability group and received the following error. After a spot of head scratching and thinking that there was something wrong with my AG setup, it turns out that there's a bug in SSMS. I was running SSMS... Continue Reading →
Have you ever had an issue where TempDB was filling up on your secondary replicas? Do those secondaries happen to be read only replicas? When I have an issue with tempdb filling up the first thing that I usually do is try to figure out exactly what the space has been allocated to. You can... Continue Reading →
