How to store a password in a database
Hello, and welcome to today’s class on storing passwords in a database. Don’t store passwords in a database. Thanks for attending. Photo by James Sutton on Unsplash.
My IT department installed an antivirus with SQL Server
Time for another short blog post, and this one combines two topics I am very passionate about: security, and SQL Server performance. Let’s start by talking about “antivirus” and what that means in today’s world.…
Do you even PowerShell, bro? An ode to dbatools and dbachecks.
Shall I compare thee to Management Studio? Thou art more scriptable and consistent. Those out-of-memory errors do tend to lose hours of work. And I mean, SSMS doesn’t run from the command line. Sometimes I…
Secure or fast? Secure, obviously …
By now you have probably seen the news about a major flaw in the design of CPUs from all major vendors (Intel, AMD, and ARM) resulting in a series of vulnerabilities in operating systems and…
All Mac users should do this immediately
This post is a public service announcement for all users of macOS High Sierra (10.13). (Note: Apple has already released a fix, but if you do not have automatic updates enabled, this may still affect…
SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out
For the last five months or so, I have been helping some really smart people put words on paper, both the physical and electronic kind, which is hopefully going to culminate in an actual technical…
Is Transparent Data Encryption just security theatre?
I love theatre. In six months I am putting on two one-act plays for a local festival, because I don’t already have enough on my plate. Security theatre, on the other hand, I don’t like.…
Connect Windows 10 client to a VPN on Windows Server 2012 R2
I got a strange request in a Slack channel the other day. A colleague in South Africa, who uses Windows, was unable to connect to our VPN (Virtual Private Network). We use the built-in VPN…
Wait For Service Pack 1
Conventional wisdom tells us that when Microsoft releases a new version of any server product, we should wait until Service Pack 1 before deploying it to production. This hasn’t been true for a while now, since Microsoft…
Do you need access to Production?
During a recent client meeting about a database migration, I realised that I have never logged into a SQL Server on their production environment. My involvement has been strictly dealing with setting up the new…
Compressed and Encrypted Backups on the Cheap
We back up our databases regularly. We store them on a secure network location so that if the database drive fails, we can still satisfy the requirements for a rapid disaster recovery time (RTO, or…
Modifying Temporal Tables – A Primer
This is part three of the Temporal Tables series. You can read parts one and two here. Last week I demonstrated how temporal tables in SQL Server 2016 work. If you have implemented a history…
End of Life for Microsoft Windows XP and Server 2003: Six-One or Up
Five months from now, Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP. As Tim Rains points out, running Windows XP after this date will effectively be an open invitation for attack. XP will, in his words, be…
- « Previous
- 1
- 2