The “Successful Login” Dilemma: Why Your Login Auditing Strategy Might Be Hurting Your Server

From bloated error logs to risky logon triggers, a guide to auditing connections without killing performance.

It’s 2026. Why are databases still failing GDPR compliance audits?

This article examines three recurring database-layer failures documented in the EDPB’s 2026 enforcement findings: the complexity of executing erasure across relational schemas, the backup paradox that can silently undo compliant deletions, and the audit log contradiction that traps organizations between two competing obligations.

Feed SQL Server logs into SIEM

Keeping track of all the security related logs can be hard. Using your security team to shoulder some of the load can help. Learn how in this article.

Audit SQL Server Extended Stored Procedures Usage

In this article, we look at how to audit and monitor the use of SQL Server extended stored procedures in your database instance.

Auditing SQL Server – Part 4 – Database Configuration Audit

This continues my series on auditing SQL Server. The fist parts covered discovery and documentation, server level hardware audits and SQL Server engine level audits. This section examines database configuration audits.

Auditing SQL Server – Part 3 – SQL Server Configuration Audit

This section gets into detailed SQL Server configuration details. This is less relevant in a cloud environment, but there are still items to confirm.

Auditing SQL Server – Part 2 – Hardware Audit

This is the second part of my series on auditing SQL Server. In the first part, I discussed basic server discovery and documentation. It covered some items to check at the hardware level and configuration items, but this section gets into more detailed hardware auditing details.

Who’s Changing the Table? Answers and Discussion

Your challenge for this week was to find out who keeps mangling the contents of the AboutMe column in the Stack Overflow database.

A New Audit

Simple script to de-identify data

An audit finding relating to production data, containing customer identifiable data, in a UAT environment, prompted this simple script, which completely scrambles data in such a way that the original value can not be reconstituted.