Featured Article(s)
Elemental MDX: Members, and an Introduction to Member Functions, Pt. 3
Part 3: BI Architect Bill Pearson continues his Elemental MDX Series with an introduction to the ”members” concept in MDX, before exploring the .Members function. Next, he introduces member “family” functions, beginning the exploration of this general group of MDX functions with the .Parent, .Children and Ancestor() functions.
Webcast: SQL Server Forensics
Have you ever received a call from one of your users asking why they received an error 3 days ago? Or maybe they want to know when a particular piece of data was deleted and who did it. Troubleshooting past events is difficult in SQL Server, but not always impossible. Learn how to set up a SQL Server to be able to respond these questions and how to use resources within SQL Server and other application logs to track down activity that otherwise might be lost.
Presented by: Sarah Barela
Security Retrofit Feedback
Dave writes about a commonly reported situation – "The wonders of third part systems.
We have a major third part system here that uses a SQL database that not only logs everyone in using the same ID and Password (great when a process hangs as it’s difficult to work out who is locking the system up), and everyone has full ownership of the DB. No integrated security, so everyone has to have their own ID and Password to the system, but then there is virtually no logging of the users activity, and this is a system aimed at Financial Services.
Oh, and I have tables with nearly 200 fields in, the designers have no concept of normalization and duplication rules OK in this design. As the alternatives are just as bad we are stuck with this system."
From Don, a similar experience – "Of my 100 servers and nearly 500 databases with one exception all use sql logins, about 70% bury user IDs and PWs in config pages or directly in internal web pages. Of those about 20 or 30 of the nearly 500 apps & their databases bury their IDs and PWs in compiled code.
That is the price of buying canned software from 3rd party vendors pitching business need satisfaction instead of good programming. It proves that satisfying business needs will always win the argument over quality regardless of the pitchman."
And Jack wrote in with some suggestions: "Paul needs to look into application roles pre-SQL Server 2005 and then at Loginless users in 2005+.
With application roles the Login has no rights to the database and once connected to the server you invoke the application role. Loginless users have the same concept except you grant impersonate on that user to your authenticated user who has no database rights. Then you use EXECUTE AS to impersonate the loginless user."
Webcast: Basics of Administering Databases for The Layman – Part 3
Okay, so you’ve gotten your data into your database. Did you do it right? Do you have too much data? Do you have the right data? Can you actually get the data out that you want? Now how do you get it out? This session will take you through some examples of why you want to have less data in a database to be more accurate (normalization), how that’s done, and how it makes the data in your database more accurate. It also explains why, in certain circumstances, it could be beneficial not to do that. Topics included will be indexes: what, why, and how to use them, what the benefits are, what the tradeoffs are. Also, different ways to maintain them and why you want to do that, and why some of Microsoft’s canned maintenance plans can be a problem and where to look for solutions to those problems.
Presented by: Tom Roush
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> Live date: 4/21/2010 at 12:00 Pacific