Additional Articles


Technical Article

Data Sanitization Techniques

Data Sanitization is the process of making sensitive information in non-production databases safe for wider visibility. This White Paper is an overview of various techniques which can be used to sanitize sensitive production data in test and development databases.

2004-11-29

1,885 reads

Technical Article

Common Vulnerabilities in Database Security

Creating an enterprise security plan is a complex endeavour. It involves evaluating multiple threats that gain access through many network paths to a hodgepodge of different applications and systems. With the focus on systems and paths, databases are frequently overlooked. Securing the database should be a fundamental tenet for any security practitioner when developing his or her security plan. The database is the source of data, the "crown jewels" in the information economy. Any security effort must start with this in mind and end with the strongest level of controls applied at the database layer.

2004-11-26

2,129 reads

Technical Article

Building a 24 x 7 Database

Over the last few years, corporations have invested billions of dollars to integrate the automations of core business systems in large ERP applications. This paper looks at the risk of downtime and solutions for building an around-the-clock database.

2004-11-24

2,129 reads

Technical Article

Updating Data in Linked Servers, Information Schema Views, and More

E
very day a developer somewhere needs to write code to iterate through SQL Server™ system objects, query and update tables in linked servers, handle optimistic concurrency, and retrieve column and stored procedure metadata. In this month's column, I will address these and other T-SQL development scenarios based on some of the questions I most frequently receive from readers.

2004-11-23

1,686 reads

Technical Article

Writing Secure Transact-SQL

There are plenty of good sources of information about how to deploy SQL Server in a secure fashion. However, these resources are often targeted at database administrators tasked with securing already developed applications. In addition, there is a rich body of information that discusses writing secure .NET and ASP.NET code, including .NET code that accesses SQL Server. However, many of these resources focus on the data access code that runs on the application servers rather than the Transact-SQL (T-SQL) code that executes within SQL Server. Developing T-SQL code that runs securely on SQL Server is the primary focus of this column.

2004-11-22

2,400 reads

Technical Article

For Loop Container Samples

One of the new tasks in SQL Server 2005 is the For Loop Container. In this article we will demonstrate a few simple examples of how this works. Firstly it is worth mentioning that the For Loop Container follows the same logic as most other loop mechanism you may have come across, in that it will continue to iterate whilst the loop test (EvalExpression) is true. There is a known issue with the EvalExpression description in the task UI being wrong at present. (SQL Server 2005 Beta 2).

2004-11-18

3,221 reads

Technical Article

File Inserter Transformation

SQL Server 2005 has made it a lot easier for us to loop over a collection and with each iteration do something with the item retrieved. In this article we are going to show you how to iterate over a folder looking at the files within and doing something with those files. In this instance we will be entering the filename into a SQL Server table and we will then load the actual files we have just found into another SQL Server table. You will note here that there is still the need to load the file names into a table as an intermediate step just as we need to do in SQL Server 2000.

2004-11-17

2,506 reads

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Multiple Deployment Processes

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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases

By Kunal Rathi

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Upgrading Admin Queries

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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