For those of you who don't have time to watch the videos, the audio stream of our webcasts are now available on SoundCloud. https://soundcloud.com/sqlundercover
Podcast Audio Now On SoundCloud
Installing External Modules into SQL Server’s Python
So Microsoft have integrated Python into SQL Server, from the moment I heard that I thought to myself, "wow, this is exciting stuff" and not just for the machine learning, BI guys that it was marketed at. It's exciting for us DBAs too, my head was in a buzz with all the things that we... Continue Reading →
Undercover Catalogue 0.1 Released
Easily Keep Track of All Your SQL Servers We know what it's like when you've got 101 SQL Servers to manage, or even just a couple. It can be almost impossible to keep track of all these servers, their versions, the databases that they host, permissions, dependencies... the list goes on. We developed the Undercover... Continue Reading →
SQL Server Encryption, What’s The Key Hierarchy All About?
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 →
A Quick Look At The All New Undercover Catalogue, Preview Release Due Out Soon…
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 →
Selecting a Random Row From a Table
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 →
Backup Your On Premise SQL Server Directly to an AWS S3 Bucket
UPDATE Aug 2024: With SQL2022, things have changed and we're now able to backup directly to S3 without the need for third part tools. Check out how to do that here... Backup SQL Server to AWS S3 Bucket (2022 Update) I've been having a little play around with AWS recently and was looking at S3 (AWS'... Continue Reading →
Convert a Positive Number To a Negative In SQL With a Spot of Bitwise Logic
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 →
Digitally Signing a Stored Procedure To Allow It To Run With Elevated Permissions
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 →
Encrypting SQL Server Database Backups
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 →
SQL Undercover 