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Let's Fix a Password Problem

The calendar has ticked over to a new year, so for those who care about such things, resolutions and plans get made. I’ve got a suggestion for you. Make this the year that you fix the password situation you’re living with.

Now, I know, a lot of you are going to say that you don’t have a password situation. For some of you, that may be true. However, there are an awful lot of you that use the same password to log in to Facebook as you use to log in to Amazon.

I’ve seen both my wife and son get hacked because they were using duplicate passwords all over the place.

Wait, you thought I was talking about work?

Well, yeah, there too. Why on earth does your SQL Server instance have the same password as the ‘sa’ login for the network (assuming these are two different log ins, sometimes they’re not )? You have two logins at work, right? One for production and one for local use? Further, they have two different passwords right?

This whole password thing is out of hand for a lot of people. So, if you are one of those, make the time (note, I didn’t say “take” the time) to clean things up. For your personal systems, get a password manager like 1Password or LastPass. Through the use of their password generation tools, which work wonderfully, you can set up a distinct password for every account you log in to. For your business, possibly the same thing. I know that some organizations have implemented those tools or maybe KeePass.

Let’s make 2020 the year that we fix this password problem.

Grant Fritchey

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

Redgate University
 
 Featured Contents
Stairway to ADF Logo

Provisioning ADF - Level 2 of the Stairway to Azure Data Factory

Andy Leonard from SQLServerCentral

In this next level of the Stairway to Azure Data Factory, learn how to build your first ADF environment.

Monitoring your Servers and Databases with New Relic Infrastructure and SQL Monitor

Additional Articles from Redgate

New Relic Infrastructure is a capable server monitoring tool but adding Integrations provides only 'bare bones' monitoring for SQL Server. Grant Fritchey argues that to "instrument" a complex system such as SQL Server, effectively, you also need a tool that is built specifically for this purpose.

The 2020 Data Professional Salary Survey Results Are In.

Additional Articles from Brent Ozar Unlimited Blog

We asked what you make, and 1,734 of you in 63 countries answered. Altogether, you made $170,753,936 this year. Damn, y’all are bringing home the bacon!

Free eBook: SQL Server Internals: In-Memory OLTP

Press Release from Redgate

In this free eBook, Kalen Delaney explains how Microsoft's 2016 In-memory OLTP engine works. In her book, learn how to use lock- and latch-free data structures to allow non-blocking data processing, and find out how to migrate existing tables to Hekaton.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Getting most recent transaction log backup time irrespective of where the transaction log backup is performed in always on availability groups

SQLPals from Mission: SQL Homeostasis

I should mention outright that this post applies to SQL Server version 2016 and up.Over the years I have relied on the backup history tables in msdb to check...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Interesting Note in SQL Server 2019 Release Notes

kleegeek from Technobabble by Klee from @kleegeek

A wonderful reader of my blog sent me a note (thanks Jess!) about a single line notation in the latest SQL Server release notes. The notes is as follows....

 

 Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

 

Python Map

I have this code in Python:
def calcsq(n):
return n*n
numbers = (2, 3, 4, 5)
result = map( calcSq, numbers)
print(result)
What is returned when I execute this?

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

 

 

 Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

The External Database Principals

What types of external principals can be stored in sys.database_principals besides Windows groups and users?

Answer: External users or groups from Azure Active Directory

Explanation: The external principals can be external users or groups from Azure Active Directory. Ref: sys.database_principals - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/system-catalog-views/sys-database-principals-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

 

 

 

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.


SQL Server 2017 - Development
Clearing the data from all the tables - Hi, there is a requirement for me to clear all the tables of the database which I am using now. There are around 100 tables in the database. Lots of unwanted data is inserted to these tables, it needs to be cleared. Most of the tables have IDENTITY (1,1) property assigned on the ID column. […]
SQL Server 2016 - Administration
SP_MSIns_ "stuck" on inserting into a table. - Hello All, I'm having trouble with transactional replication I'm hoping someone can help with. I have Server A (publisher), Distro (Distribution server), and Server B (Subscriber). All servers are 2016. B is our report server. We have a particular table I'll just call 'Sales' that might have 300 records replicated to it in a day. […]
Will adding files to TempDB replicate to 2nd node within an always on group? - I want to add 3 more datafiles to tempdb on a database server that has a second node in an always on high availability group. With MSSQL (I'm more used to Oracle) when I do this on the primary server, does the DDL get ran on the 2nd node and the files created on it […]
SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL
Get data on specific time interval - Hi All, Happy new year 2020. It been long time I am here. There is a job running for me daily @ 4 AM and @ 4 PM daily If any of the job failed say if @ 4 AM job failed it will be retriggered @8AM/9AM based on some business logic and if 4PM […]
Comparing to Columns from the same table - I am subtracting two columns (_REG_READING- START_REG_READING) and want to match the output (ActualRead) with another columns (FINAL_REG_QTY) to know if there is any difference. But I am getting the error message  “invalid identifier” Below is the query… select BSEG_ID,SP_ID,FINAL_REG_QTY,START_REG_READING, END_REG_READING,END_REG_READING- START_REG_READING AS ActualRead from CI_BSEG_READ where FINAL_REG_QTY <> ActualRead =---- If someone can help
How to correct the query and make it working in 2016 - WITH T1 (ID1, ID2) AS ( SELECT 1,1 UNION ALL SELECT 1,1 UNION ALL SELECT 1,1 UNION ALL SELECT 1,2 ) SELECT *, RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY ID1, ORDER BY ID2) AS 'RANK', ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY ID1, ORDER BY ID2) AS 'ROW_NUMBER', DENSE_RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY ID1, ORDER BY ID2) AS 'DENSE_RANK' FROM T1 […]
Two tables but if 2nd table has one row that is to be ignored - I cannot think of an easy way Two Tables Table 1    PROJECT            Project_ID , Client ID Data Project_ID , Client ID 101000   A00001 101000   A00002 102000  A1111111 Table 2   CLIENT        Client_ID    ROLE Client ID   ROLE A00001    SYS A00002   SYS A1111111   SYS SELECT * FROM […]
Administration - SQL Server 2014
Cluster, HA., replication. what are my options without a static ip address - SQL Server 2014, we have never been asked to provide redundancy until now.  We have servers but they are all virtual and do not have static ip addresses.  I need to know what kind of fail over I can do when I dont have an ip address.  I have spent most of this year researching […]
Development - SQL Server 2014
Index larger than table - I am looking at the large amount of space taken up by indexes and have a few questions; I have been searching online for a while and can't find seem to find a direct answer.  For context I have more of an Oracle background. On a table with a clustered primary key, is the row […]
SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL
How to get highest bonus and second highest bnus paid freelancer for each group - I have a table below: Freelancer(id, fl_name, bonus, fl_group) Create table Freelancer (id int, fl_name varchar(20), bonus int, fl_group varchar(50)) insert into Freelancer (id, fl_name, bonus, fl_group) Values (1, 'John', 1000, 'SQL') insert into Freelancer (id, fl_name, bonus, fl_group) Values (2, 'Jane', 990, 'MySQL') insert into Freelancer (id, fl_name, bonus, fl_group) Values (3, 'Jimmy', 320, […]
SQL Server 2019 - Administration
Always Encrypted - Data Types - I am starting to take an in-depth look at always encrypted and have been working through some examples. I have a column which is an integer and i have selected that column for always encrypted encryption. When i query this column, the encrypted data is returned (not an integer) but the data type of the […]
dbmail mail alert code - Hi, I am new to the SQL coding. Need help in configuring the mirroring alert when the db will go to suspect mode. I configured dbmailprofile and succesfully i am able to send the mail through sql server . now for alert i given the below step in job. exec msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @profile_name='newprofile1', @recipients='abc@xyz.com', @query='select name,state_desc […]
SQL Azure - Administration
Correlation of DTU and RAM in ( GB) allocated to DB - Hi, Azure portal  and DMV providing   % of memory used by database I want to query  MAX  RAM in GB allocated to server assuming  we have only one customer  database per server DTU 500 = ? GB Ram , DTU 1750 = ? GB Ram Is this information secret ?      Thank you Alex
Reporting Services
ssrs 2012 page footer - in an ssrs 2012 report, my user would like a page footer to only be displayed when there is a specific 'group' changes. Basically this would only occur when a school name changes. This request is being made for a large school district that contains a large volume of schools. If this is possible, would […]
Integration Services
Improve or replace Script Component - Dear SSC, I've been working on something here to replace a function which was called as part of a Script Task. That part actually flies now but there's more to that: Business Logic (which I moved from the Script Task to a Transformation Script Component) which seems to be processed RBAR ( which renders my […]
 

 

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