One of the tenets of good security is that no person or process is granted more rights than it needs to accomplish a task. This is the Principle of Least Privilege, and is designed to ensure that your system is as secure, stable, and predictable as possible.

For a… Read more

Like most of us, I get a lot of email. I get subscribed to various services from different ads, events, etc. throughout the year. That’s fine. I understand how marketing works, and the reason that I get some free services, or some lower cost events is because of the marketing… Read more

I’ll be delivering the Modern Resume presentation at SQL Saturday #183 in Albuquerque, NM on February 9, 2013. I got my acceptance today and replied that I’ll be there.

This is the first SQL Saturday in New Mexico, which is a little exciting. I’ve been there a few times since… Read more

I saw a note this week from CNet about a system built to crack passwords (also on ArsTechnica). It reminded me of the story of the guy that cracked Googles DKIM key at 512bits. Not insignificant, until you get to the point of renting that power from AWS for… Read more

It’s time once again for T-SQL Tuesday, and this month is hosted by SQLity.net, Sebastian Meine.

If you want to know more or participate, read the invitation and write your own blog post.

The topic this month is joins, in honor of Sebastian’s a-join-a-day series. He’s writing about… Read more

An Updated list of all the topics.

I was looking for a static list of all the T-SQL Tuesday topics and couldn’t find one. The domain moves around to the current hosting blog, so when it was my turn to host it, I made a list just so I could… Read more

A first for me. I’m attending a non-SQL Server event, trying to bring a little knowledge of my platform to those that typically work on the Oracle side of things.

The Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group is holding their Training Days 2013 event on Feb 11-13 in Denver and a… Read more

I’m gathering a few metrics around the Internet for SQL Server from people that I think really know how to run a SQL Server. This is a series of posts that I’m making to gather these metrics up for easy access later.

Host Memory

The short metric is:

Leave 4GB… Read more

I ran across a question on Twitter recently where someone asked about the DBCC CHECKDB date after a restore. For those of you that don’t know this, you can run this command on your instance (in a database)

DBCC DBINFO WITH tableresults;

This returns a lot of information, but… Read more

I delivered my Encryption Primer talk this past Tuesday at the Boulder SQL Server Users Group and last night at the Denver SQL Server Users Group. Great questions and discussions, and I hope those of you that attended found it interesting.

I’ve updated my deck and code samples, and here… Read more

I’ve been giving an encryption talk over the last year, focusing on educating DBAs on the various features and capabilities available in SQL Server. One of the things I note in the talk is that SHA1 is not considered secure. You should avoid SHA or SHA1 if you are… Read more

I’m scheduled to give “The Encryption Primer” at the Denver SQL Server Users Group on the November 15 meeting. It’s a basic look at the encryption features in SQL Server, updated for SQL Server 2012. The meeting is in the Denver Tech Center and we usually have a… Read more

I’m scheduled to give “The Encryption Primer” at the Boulder SQL Server Users Group on the November 13 meeting. It’s a basic look at the encryption features in SQL Server, updated for SQL Server 2012. This meeting is at the Confio office and will have a short presentation… Read more

I’ll be live on the PASS TV broadcast on Wednesday, Nov 7, at 11:40am PST. The Professional Development group asked me to do a short (15 minute) talk, and I’ve put together a set of quick blogging tips with a few slides.

If you’re not at the PASS Summit, you… Read more

I’m making the slides available from my SQL in the City 2012 talks. You can download them here

• Prepare for Disaster
• Database Maintenance Essentials
• The Encryption Primer

If you attended, you’ll get an email with links to videos to watch soon.

Read more

Looks like I’m not the only one enjoying Friday.

Some of the staff at Red Gate had a Hawaiian day. Nice shirts, though perhaps I need to take a few over when I go since I think mine at much cooler

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Good advice from Jeff Bezos.

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I haven’t worked with Window 8 at all. I’m not a big beta tester, and it’s been a busy few months for me, so I haven’t bothered to mess with any of the previews. My Win 7 desktop works well for me, and I haven’t bothered to think about doing… Read more

One of the issues that I see published often on forums like SQLServerCentral is the advice to update statistics on your tables if you have strange performance issues, or sudden changes in performance. Statistics are important for the query optimizer, and you should understand the basics of how they… Read more

A mention today from Jamie Thomson in his blog on source control. I left a comment, but it was long, so I thought I’d repost it here.

My comment

Thanks for the note, Jamie, and it’s interesting, but I don’t see any respondents that aren’t using VSC. I’m guessing… Read more