Spotting Unauthorized Configuration Settings in SQL Server

If someone makes unauthorized changes to SQL Server configuration settings, it could compromise the availability, performance or security of your servers. Using using Extended Events, and a custom metric, in SQL Monitor, Phil Factor offers a way to get an immediate notification of such changes, and investigate their cause. Read more

Merging a Conflict with SQL Source Control and Beyond Compare

Tony Davis explains how to resolve simple merge conflicts, such as conflicting changes to the same stored procedure, using SQL Source Control and a merge tool such as Beyond Compare. Read more

Testing the Performance of Individual SQL Statements within a Batch using SQL Prompt

With SQL Prompt and Phil Factor's chk code snippet, you can, with a few clicks, get a list of all the SQL statements executed within a batch, in SSMS, their execution plans, and their execution statistics, such as duration, CPU, logical reads and so on. Read more

How to Detect SQL Injection Attacks using Extended Events and SQL Monitor

Phil Factor shows how to monitor for the errors indicative of a possible SQL Injection attack on one of your SQL Server databases, using a SQL Monitor custom metric that uses diagnostic data from Extended Events. Read more

The Changing Role of SQL Server Monitoring

Grant Fritchey explains how a modern monitoring tool must adapt, as our SQL Server databases grow in number and size, and migrate onto new cloud-based, containerized or virtual machine-based SQL Servers. Read more

Pseudonymizing a Database with Realistic Data for Development Work

How to use SQL Data Generator, and PowerShell to obfuscate personal data (names), while retaining the same distribution of data, so that the test database behaves like the original. Read more

SQL Prompt Code Analysis: Avoid using the ISNUMERIC Function (E1029)

Avoid using the IsNumeric() function, because it can often lead to data type conversion errors, when importing data. On SQL Server 2012 or later, use the Try_Convert() or Try_Cast() function instead. On earlier SQL Server versions, the only way to avoid it is by using LIKE expressions. Read more

Documenting your Database with SQL Change Automation

Phil Factor uses SQL Change Automation and PowerShell to verify that the source code for the current database version builds successfully and, if so, to generate web-based database documentation using SQL Doc. Read more

SQL Prompt Code Analysis: INSERT INTO a permanent table with ORDER BY (PE020)

Data in relational tables is never guaranteed to be returned in a particular order, so adding an ORDER BY to an INSERT INTO statement is meaningless and, pre-SQL Server 2012, could cause performance issues. If you really need to impose a particular order on rows in the table, use a Row_Number() window clause instead. Read more

Spoofing Realistic Credit Card Data for your Test Systems using Data Masker

Grant Fritchey shows how to use Data Masker to create fake credit card data that not only looks like the real thing, but also has the right distribution, so will act like it too, when we query it. Read more

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