In SQL Server Management Studio you find Schemas under the Security group. The schema that is most often used in the database is Database Owner, or DBO. User access accounts may be granted the DBO schema, or select permissions related to anything owned by the schema. For example, an SQL Login may be granted execution permission to any stored procedure […]

One of the things making it difficult to automate testing of SQL Code is that most test frameworks are based on scalar data, not sets. I’ve spent hours rolling my own data table comparison tool based on ADO.Net data tables. It took forever to write and perfect. I had to add a number of features to the library as I […]

I came across this blog at SQL Sentry the other day entitled “A ‘drop column’ fix you’ll want for SQL Server 2012 / 2014”, by Aaron Bertrand.. The blog exposes a bug in SQL Server 2012/2014, that, if you drop a column in a table, under some circumstances the data becomes corrupt. I’ll let you read it on your own […]

AZ Jim comments in my editorial about SharePoint as a Service: “One thing I haven’t heard discussed about SharePoint as a Service is security/auditability. For PaaS, database encryption at-rest is the norm (I believe). But unless your Word and Excel files are incorporated as database LOBs, are the external files encrypted? That plays a key role in regulatory compliance for […]

Today I want to share the best failure I ever had. It was early in my career, and it marked me for decades to come. I was building a data import for a large data warehouse in the ‘90s. We imported medical claims and eligibility information on a monthly basis. The import tool we bought reached a point where there […]

For the longest time, some of the biggest hesitations have been founded in security in the cloud. But things are changing – the problems are starting to get resolved. As different things come online, from always encrypted SQL Server features to dealing with certificates and keys and the like, it seems to be time to reconsider and reevaluate. I caught […]

I’ve been spending a lot of time this last week fighting and arguing with tools and frameworks. It seems like the more we want tools to automatically generate code for repeatable things, like an ORM, the more we give up on good design. The code generators tell us how to design our systems, because they only implement the happy path. […]

I have been doing a lot of comparison of the Sharepoint offerings available today, and came across Bob German’s editorial on the topic. While I was looking for comparisons of Sharepoint as a Platform on Azure to Sharepoint on premise, I came to understand there is a completely different capability, regardless of where it is hosted; Sharepoint as a Service. […]

An agile DBA is committed to re-factoring database schema and code. This is not something we traditionally like to do, as a DBA. The reason is simple. Unlike code, making a change to your database has to be concerned with Data Loss. So, changing things like stored procedures, functions, etc. is not that difficult. But, when you change the underlying […]

When you choose an agile SDLC, it changes, to some degree, the meaning of “Done”. In a perfect Agile environment, when your code is complete, you should be able to release it to a production environment. In agile, for a period of work, you select a feature that is consistent within itself. This means, if it depends on another feature […]