Infrastructure at your Service
SQL Server Management Studio is a well know integrated environment used to manage SQL Server infrastructure. This new version 17.4 can support SQL Server from 2008 up to 2017. It enhances existing features like Showplan, XE Profiler (complete list here) but also add an interesting one which is the Vulnerability Assessment. Vulnerability Assessment will scan a database in order to help you to track security holes and deviations. Rules to define those deviations are based…
Last Friday I saw a very interesting session in Pass Summit 2017 about how to Bypass, or Ensure, SQL Server security by Matt Martin. Matt explained us how to bypass SQL Server security with the complicity of your SQL Server DBA. Msdb is the most powerful database to get stuff done: mail, jobs… so let’s have a look how to take the power within a SQL Server instance. Start a job under SQLAgentOperator role SQLAgentOperator…
Today starts the Pass Summit 2017 taking place in Seattle. After a small fly over the Ocean, more than 10 hours… yesterday, and a nice jet lag which avoid me to sleep later than 4AM this morning, I arrived to the Convention Center in Seattle where the Pass takes place. I start this first day by the session of Itzik Ben-Gan: T-SQL Tips and Tricks. As part of the session, Itzik spoke about batch processing…
Beginning of last week Microsoft announced the general availability of SQL Server 2017 for today, the second of October. In the same time, but in a more marketing side, Microsoft announced a SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux offer, more information here. It looked for me like the good time to do my first installation of SQL Server 2017 on Linux. My first concern was to download an ISO of the Red Hat Enterprise…
I wrote some months ago several blog posts about the new Container feature of Windows Server 2016. Here is the list: Windows Server 2016: Containers Windows Containers: Migration Windows Container: installation and utilization Today, I will install the Container feature, install Docker and deploy a container. First of all, I need to enable the Container and the Hyper-V feature, take care if you use VirtualBox because after having enable Hyper-V this won’t work anymore. Windows…
Last week, dbi services organized an event named “SQL Server 2016: what’s new?” in Lausanne, Basel and Zurich. I would take the opportunity to say again a big thank you to everyone which joined us. During my session some questions concerning the new functionality Dynamic Data Masking were asked. In fact data are masked for some roles and not for some others. Let’s try to clarify that. I will use the same script I used…
In my last blog post about SQL Server 2016 Always Encrypted, here, I showed how to use this new functionality but also that you have to separate the different execution context with an Application server, a database server and a security server to avoid that certificate will be available for all users and break the segregation. Let’s see how to build those environment. In my security server named SQL2016-2, I first create a Self-signed certificate…
One of the top new features of SQL Server 2016 is the Always Encrypted functionality. Always Encrypted provides that data, store in a database, remains encrypted the all times there are in the database. There is a complete separation between persons who own the data and person who manage it. Only persons who own the data can see plain text data and person like DBAs, sys admins or privilege logins cannot have access to the…
In my last blog post, here, I spoke about how to place SCOM group in maintenance mode. This script is really interesting with an integration in Windows Task Scheduler. At the end, the main purpose is to plan a maintenance window of our different servers. Let’s see how we can do that with PowerShell script. First, I try to use the cmdlet Register-ScheduledTask, which can be used to register a scheduled task definition on a…
Some weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about the creation of SCOM groups in order to subscribe to alerts. Subscribe to alert is mandatory, of course, to be able to receive alerts concerning our group. But during operations like an update, a patching, …, we don’t want to be spoiled by lots of alerts. To avoid those unexpected Emails, we need to place our group and so, objects contained in this group, in maintenance…
