When you hear about breaches, so many times it’s because someone didn’t do their job protecting their SQL Server, protecting the data, or protecting the pipes that feed and move the data around. It’s a big deal – and with your (likely) cloud environment, the model and approach to all of this is changing. Chain of custody… “that records the […]
Administration
Old Guidelines Still Apply
Back in the day… standard advice was to get that SQL Server off the Internet, public-facing access, if at all possible. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn’t because of application access and other issues with moving it to a private segment. But the key is to remove those sensitive layers of access to SQL Server – control the surface area […]
Catch-22 For Data Use Transparency
As different systems roll out to use different data sets, a trend is emerging – that trend is using data in ways we never thought possible, in seeing trends across data sets and between solutions – things that we never imagined having relationships suddenly start to show relationships. Sounds like a dream come true – our hard-fought battles with SQL […]
Interesting: Data Bread Lines
In reading through a post about a book that’s out about managing and living with data, there were some very interesting observations outlined. Things that are pretty apparent as you work through systems at companies with many different sources of information and raw data. The post was a book excerpt, from “Winning With Data” (Wiley). If you think about it, […]
Will Fake News Become Fake Data?
These are interesting times to be working with data – from the issues that Facebook has seen with sharing information without consent and their ongoing response to that whole thing to the breaches and other illicit accesses to information. From data trust issues to IT trust issues in a much broader sense. There have been a number of things happening […]
Inventory control and your databases….
No, not the “what servers do you have and what do they have on them” variety necessarily. In a previous life, inventory and point of sale systems were a focus, and one of the great things that we could nearly always point to surrounded that initial inventory of the store location – their stuff on the shelves. So many times, […]
Where to Start is Often the Question – Here’s Help
One of the bigger challenges as you get your footing with your databases and start addressing all sorts of issues of security, compliance and such – is where to start. How do you know what’s missing or needs attention when there are so many different areas that may indeed need attention? We’ve talked about all sorts of things, from encryption […]
GDPR Doesn’t Mean Useless Data
A huge challenge with data systems right now is “OK, great. So I have to do all of these things to comply with the GDPR and other privacy laws that are out there now (or will be soon, surely), but I have a conflicting obligation to provide useful information to my company, what do I do?” Depending on your company, […]
Planning that next platform upgrade or migration
Completing a migration, whether it’s for version-to-version migration or for platform updates or even moving to a cloud-based solution from an on-premises solution, is a major project. Even a sideways version swap, accompanied by a platform change can mean all sorts of things in terms of settings, features, capabilities that may have to be modified, for sure have to be […]
Using Throw-Away Databases, Tables
We’ve been doing some work with a few different database systems that are supported on the different cloud platforms – work where we’re using the databases as either a pre-processing or holding-zone for data that isn’t quite yet ready to be fed into the overall scheme of things for the customers. It was an odd realization that with many of […]