Product articles SQL Provision Compliant Database Provisioning

Data Masking in Practice

This article takes a strategic look at common SQL data masking techniques, and the challenges inherent in masking certain types of sensitive and personal data, while ensuring that it still looks like the real data, and retains its referential integrity, and distribution characteristics. It also explains, briefly, with references, the tools that one can use to mask different types of data and how to provision development and test machines with these 'de-sensitized' databases, or alternatively to produce fake data that looks like the real thing, but in fact is generated randomly. Read more

Practical steps for end-to-end data protection

If you plan to make production data available for development and test purposes, you'll need to understand which columns contain personal or sensitive data, create a data catalog to record those decisions, devise and implement a data masking, and then provision the sanitized database copies. Richard Macaskill show how to automate as much of this process as possible. Read more

Dealing with Server Objects, Settings and Features when Provisioning Databases

If we want the behavior and performance of our test databases to mimic that observed in production, then we must consider not only the database but also the server. Grant Frtichey reviews the server-level objects, settings and features that we may need to consider, and then shows how to 'synchronize' the linked servers, user logins and SQL Agent jobs, as part of an automated provisioning process, using SQL Provision. Read more