I was working on a project many years ago where we were integrating authorization into our system. We already had authentication solved, but we wanted to restrict presenting the user with features they could not exercise. We wanted to restrict those features both in the user experience, and in the database access. The project manager had developed a very sophisticated […]

What is a full stack developer? This seems to be a frequent request for job opportunities. Is it something you could respond to with confidence? Is there really such a skill set? Let’s consider what full stack could mean in the Dot Net world. You could use a windows Forms client, and talk directly to a database. You could use […]

January 17, 2017 SSWUG.org is hosting a great event for those wishing to improve their SQL skills. This free webcast is titled “All About Joins”. Read more at https://sswug.org/events/. SQL Server supports the different ANSI join methods that are the core capability of any SQL Engine. However, in order to optimize performance, there are different implementations for joining data between […]

Recently I was asked to create a database audit program. It was designed to audit roles, schemas, users, login associations, permissions for roles and users and role/user schema assignments. I’ve written this kind of program before. Usually I use SQL Data Management Object. This time I wrote the application using system views and functions. I find the performance to be […]

Does your disaster recovery plan work? You never really know until you test it. You’ll be surprised at the things you find out when testing your disaster recovery plan. It really doesn’t matter what the plan is, or what tools you are using to implement your plan. The point is, until you actually experience a simulated failure you have no […]

What is your disaster recovery plan when your data is in the cloud? Many people think that since their data is in the cloud that it has a built in disaster recovery capability. They can’t be more wrong. Let me give you a few scenarios that have or could happen. Let’s say you’re hosting in the Amazon Cloud. They have […]

As we have discussed backup strategies we have not covered a few important things you should also know about database backups built into Sql Server. We talked about the primary backup methods, full, differential, and transaction log backups. There is a fourth backup option where you can backup a single file group. This is called a file group option. This […]

We’ve been talking about using Database Maintenance Wizards to create disaster recovery implementations through database backups. If your new to managing SQL databases this probably makes a lot of sense to you. You backup your database. If a disaster happens, you restore the database after hardware becomes available. In our comments there was a lot of talk about why we […]

Last time we were talking about how the maintenance wizard can help you with syntax to get maintenance jobs created and working. However, using the maintenance wizard cannot replace the knowledge you need to have to determine what maintenance jobs need to be done, and when they should be performed. Today I’m going to talk at a high level about […]

We’ve been talking about how to create and perform automated database maintenance tasks for the non-DBA individual. Primarily, we have been focusing on tasks that can be performed real time, or scheduled to be done during hours when the database is less active, such as updating statistics, or defragmenting indexes. However, there are some maintenance tasks you really need to […]