Ben Johnston in Blogs Choosing Data Types and Column Options An entire post on choosing the correct data types either seems like overkill or much needed and overdue. The perspective... 31 August 2024 27 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs Auditing SQL Server – Part 4 – Database Configuration Audit This continues my series on auditing SQL Server. The fist parts covered discovery and documentation, server level hardware audits and... 20 August 2024 15 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs Auditing SQL Server – Part 3 – SQL Server Configuration Audit This is the continuation of my series on auditing SQL Server. In the first part, I discussed basic server discovery... 25 July 2024 21 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs Auditing SQL Server – Part 2 – Hardware Audit This is the second part of my series on auditing SQL Server. In the first part, I discussed basic server... 17 July 2024 13 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs Auditing SQL Server – Part 1 – Discovery and Documentation Inheriting a server, whether as an inexperienced user or an experienced DBA, has many challenges. It’s very helpful to evaluate... 06 June 2024 29 min read
Ben Johnston Building a Culture of Data: The Technical Aspects In the first part of this two-part series, I covered the mostly non-technical aspects of building a data culture. While... 19 April 2024 13 min read
Ben Johnston in Culture Building a Culture of Data One of the major trends in enterprise computing, and really in enterprises themselves is an increased emphasis on data. My... 04 April 2024 19 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs Friendly Deletes in SQL Server One of the first things you learn when working with SQL Server, and other transactional based SQL systems, is that... 01 March 2024 24 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs Feature Flags in Data Projects My motivation for writing this summary was an interaction with a project owner that didn’t understand why we couldn’t use... 01 February 2024 23 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs Warehouse Load Patterns – Part 2 – Load Patterns This continues and finishes my two-part series on warehouse load patterns. There are many methods to transfer rows between systems... 31 December 2023 29 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs Warehouse Load Patterns – Part 1 – Requirements and General Patterns No matter the ETL tool used, there are some basic patterns to follow when transferring data between systems. There are... 26 November 2023 28 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs SQL Server Security Primer SQL Server security structure, mechanisms and methods are very thoroughly documented in the Microsoft documentation, but it is quite daunting... 15 October 2023 37 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs SQL Server Row Level Security Deep Dive. Part 6 – RLS Attack Mitigations As seen in the previous section, there are several ways bad actors can attempt to bypass RLS. Attacks range from... 03 October 2023 24 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs SQL Server Row Level Security Deep Dive. Part 5 – RLS Attacks As mentioned in previous sections, RLS is an addition to security and should not be used as the primary method... 25 September 2023 21 min read
Ben Johnston in Blogs SQL Server Row Level Security Deep Dive. Part 4 – Integration, Anti-patterns, and Alternatives One of the primary reasons to implement RLS is to facilitate reporting and ease the administrative burden. This section covers... 17 September 2023 20 min read
Blogs Ben Johnston in Blogs SQL Server Row Level Security Deep Dive. Part 3 – Performance and Troubleshooting Previous sections gave a brief introduction to RLS, including some common use cases. They also showed how to implement RLS... 10 September 2023 24 min read
Blogs Ben Johnston in Blogs SQL Server Row Level Security Deep Dive. Part 2 – Setup and Examples The previous section in this series was an introduction to Row Level Security (RLS) and some use cases. This section... 03 September 2023 16 min read
Blogs Ben Johnston in Blogs SQL Server Row Level Security Deep Dive. Part 1 – Introduction and Use Cases My initial goal of documenting and exploring SQL Server Row Level Security (RLS) was to show the basic functionality and... 01 August 2023 17 min read
Blogs Ben Johnston in Blogs Unmasking SQL Server Dynamic Data Masking, Part 5, Mitigations and Summary This is the fifth and final part of this series on SQL Server Dynamic Data Masking. The first part in... 30 July 2023 13 min read
Blogs Ben Johnston in Blogs Unmasking SQL Server Dynamic Data Masking, Part 4, Unmasking Formatted and Unformatted Text Continuing from the previous entry in this series on security concerns with using Dynamic Data Masking, in this blog I... 27 June 2023 30 min read