Compliance means keeping a close grip on any changes to the permissions and access control of a database. Sadly, the law has had to acknowledge, from bitter experience, that it is not just external intruders who want to do this, but it could also be attempts at fraud or data theft from within the organisation. Read more
You need to make sure that nobody makes unauthorized changes to the metadata of your production databases. Governance and testing processes during the deployment pipeline are there to ensure that any proposed database changes aren’t going to open any legal or security issues, and that they won’t introduce any bugs as a side effect. Once Read more
Back in 2012, I was transitioning into the role of ‘Director of Data Services’, at the Fortune 500 insurance organization where I worked. It wasn’t that easy. Previously, as a DBA, I’d spent time developing my own database monitoring and documentation solutions. Now, I needed to alter my perspective to take in the broad landscape Read more
An attacker of SQL Server likes to be able to change the SQL Server configuration settings. In an ideal world, you will have left everything open for the intruder, but generally, every DBA reduces the surface of attack as much as possible. Why would the attacker want to change these settings? You might think there’s Read more
Even if all precautions have been taken to prevent SQL Injection attacks, as laid out in the OWASP website, it is still wise to be able to detect if an attempted attack is taking place, and it is essential to know if such an attack is successful. There are several strategies for detecting SQL Injection Read more
As SQL Server estates continue to grow quickly, and change in nature, due to the ease with which new cloud-based, containerized or virtual machine-based SQL Servers can be provisioned, so too the role of the monitoring tool changes. In organizations that need to monitor a large population of SQL Servers, many of which are highly Read more
If your SQL Server runs out of disk space, and it is running a database for an enterprise’s trading application, then the company can’t take money until the DBA fixes the problem. Even the worry of that ever happening is enough to keep a DBA up at night. No wonder, then, that the recent State Read more
Most organizations are finding that the size and number of databases that need to be monitored is increasing, unlike the number of people available to do the work. Now that it is possible for the organization to scale out to cloud-hosted databases, the constraints of the available infrastructure have ceased to govern the growth of Read more
A call comes in to the DBA from Help Desk. There is an urgent problem with a reporting application; unhappy users say that their screens are “frozen”, and not because of an overactive A/C vent. Some have reported seeing a timeout issue related to SQL. Is it a blocking problem? As a DBA, if blocking Read more
Many organizations are experiencing rapid expansion and diversification of their SQL Server estate to include Cloud, VMWare and other platforms, alongside traditional on-premise servers. This article explains the basic architecture and components of SQL Monitor, and then how to set up a distributed monitoring solution. It will allow a single administrative team to manage and Read more
Compliant Database DevOps
