Five Nines

Yearly Uptime of Four Nines

Removing Deleted Pages

Reusing Tools for New Purposes

Steve likes the idea of reusing one tool to do another job.

Endpoint Authentication Order

How to (Somewhat) Increase SQL Server Security

Problem Some time ago Argenis Fernandez(@DBArgenis) found and described a vulnerability that allows you to get into SQL Server with 'sa' rights. This method does not require a restart of the SQL Server service or the whole machine, the condition is a local administrator account on the server. Reminder SQL Server until 2008R2: Until SQL 2008R2, […]

SQL Server instance startup type check by SQL script

I have developed the script to check SQL Server instances startup type, sometimes we didn't know all our SQL instances startup type correctly configurated, especially we cannot distinguish the Automatic and Automatic(Delayed Start) from the direct query, the only way is querying from the registry, you can use this script in your environment to bulk […]

The Challenge of Edge Security

We will see databases deployed on the edge, and we will need strong security patches.

SQL Server Data Classification Comes Alive

Overview Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduced a feature called data classification, which allows you to mark certain columns with labels, indicating that these columns contain sensitive or special-handling data. For instance, you may want to mark a column containing credit card numbers as "confidential", or sales numbers as "management only". The problem is that you […]

Get backup folder sizes from shared Location

Got a message from the Operation team as below Hi Harsha, I'm seeing a larger than normal rate of change for a week day on the backups for the SQL2000 servers. Did anything run differently yesterday compared to Monday? I have 22 sql servers and all the Weekend and Monthly backups goes to the location […]