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SQL

Challenges with Dynamic Data Masking

Recently we’ve been looking at Dynamic Data Masking and what it can achieve for us. With that said however, there are some drawbacks to how it works which its worth being aware of before you consider implementing it. Even in the official documentation it states that the feature “limits” exposure, can be used to “simplify” design, and […]

Categories
SQL

Dynamic Data Masking Patterns

When we initially looked at Dynamic Data Masking we used the default function to mask our data so it showed xxxx. With the masking however there are a few functions available to allow us to mask data in particular ways which may be of use depending on our use case. We’ll create a record to apply these masks against so […]

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T-SQL Tuesday

T-SQL Tuesday #151 – Coding Standards

This month’s invitation comes from Mala who asks us about the T-SQL coding rules relevant for where we work. There’s certainly a lot of scope in this question and Mala links to a great set of posts from Robert Sheldon which cover quite a number of these points. Whilst larger businesses may well have matured standards in […]

Categories
SQL

Introduction to Dynamic Data Masking

Given the abundance of data we deal with day to day its increasingly likely that we’ll find ourselves storing items of a more sensitive nature. We may only deal with details sensitive about our business such as suppliers or profitability, but when that increases – for example customer details – then we want to ensure […]

Categories
SQL

Testing Permissions with EXECUTE AS

When you’re developing a new database solution you’ll inevitably want to apply some security to that data. If you have complex security requirements with users being members of multiple groups or implementing multiple roles within the database it can become tricky to ensure that everything is working exactly as you like. It’s certainly a hassle […]

Categories
SQL

Additional Temporal Table Features

We’ve recently been looking at temporal tables, how they work, we query them and how to modify them. All of these are consistent since the feature was added in SQL Server 2016. There are however a couple of extra features which were added in 2017 to make these even more usable. Let’s use our previous […]

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SQL

Modifying Temporal Tables

Recently we’ve been looking at temporal tables including the basics for using them and options for querying them. Continuing with this theme – and given that tables rarely remain static – we’ll look at what we might need to consider when modifying their structure. As with the previous posts we’ll start our with our sample […]

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Personal SQL T-SQL Tuesday

T-SQL Tuesday #150 – My First Tech Job

This month’s invitation from Kenneth Fisher asks us to share our first tech job. As he points out there are a lot of DBAs who don’t start out working with databases and we slowly succumb to the dark side (my words, not his), intentionally or otherwise. During a gap year whilst at university I joined […]

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SQL

Querying Temporal Tables

During our initial introduction we briefly saw how to query temporal tables but there were a couple of specific bits which I wanted to cover around querying these tables. The first of these concerns the point in time we query against and the second is how we go about using that point in time to […]

Categories
SQL

Diving Deeper into Temporal Tables

Last time out we took a brief look at temporal tables, how to create them and what they can do for us. This time I’d like to dive a bit deeper into them and see how they look under the covers. For this we’ll be using the same table which we ended up creating previously: […]