Deborah Melkin is hosting the community T-SQL Tuesday #184 carnival of blog posts. Her topic is one that is near and dear to her – and also near and dear to us here at Straight Path – Mentoring and Sponsorships. I am really looking forward to reading all of the posts this topic generates. Deb ... Read more The post On Mentoring: A T-SQL Tuesday post appeared first on SQL Server Consulting - Straight Path Solutions ..read more

For full disclosure – this is the business we are in here at Straight Path IT Solutions. We know something about running a SQL Server Managed Services practice. While we’d love to talk to you and work with us, there are a lot of excellent firms out there like our friends at Dallas DBAs, Procure ... Read more The post Evaluating SQL Server Managed Service Providers. appeared first on SQL Server Consulting - Straight Path Solutions ..read more

Addressing orphaned users is an important piece of SQL Server security management. When left unchecked, you can accumulate an overwhelming number of users that exist in a database but do not have a correlating login in the master database, thus preventing access to the server or the database at all. There are dbatools PowerShell modules ... Read more The post Managing Orphaned Users in SQL Server with sp_FindOrphanedUser appeared first on SQL Server Consulting - Straight Path Solutions ..read more

Whether you are backing up your SQL Server databases with Ola Hallengren’s scripts, Maintenance Plans, or some third-party software, your backups are your lifeline for recovering your data in case of a disaster. So…are your databases recoverable? Do you know WHERE your most recent backups were written? Do you know WHEN they were written? Did ... Read more The post Introducing sp_CheckBackup: Check Your SQL Server Backups for Recoverability Issues appeared first on SQL Server Consulting - Straight Path Solutions ..read more

This post is part of our SQL Server security blog series, 30 SQL Server Security Checks in 30 Days. We’re publishing a new security check every day in the month of June. Visit our sp_CheckSecurity page to learn about our free SQL Server tool you can download and run to check your own server. Thanks for tuning into our posts for the 30 SQL Server security checks in 30 days series this month. I want to recap the entire month of posts with a few homework assignments to get you started today. Assignment #1 – Change your mindset. We’ve talked about a lot of the checks in our sp_CheckSecurity tool ..read more

This post is part of our SQL Server security blog series, 30 SQL Server Security Checks in 30 Days. We’re publishing a new security check every day in the month of June. Visit our sp_CheckSecurity page to learn about our free SQL Server tool you can download and run to check your own server. As we wrap up our month of posts about SQL Server security and information about our SQL Server security checks, let’s talk about SQL Injection. We’ll deconstruct a pattern of attack we’ve seen before, and talk about prevention and awareness. SQL Injection has been around long before xkcd gave us Little ..read more

This post is part of our SQL Server security blog series, 30 SQL Server Security Checks in 30 Days. We’re publishing a new security check every day in the month of June. Visit our sp_CheckSecurity page to learn about our free SQL Server tool you can download and run to check your own server. Audits are a crucial component of SQL server that helps to ensure the security and integrity of your data. SQL Server built in auditing functionality, in particular, provides a robust framework for tracking and logging events occurring in the database engine. However, it’s not enough to merely set up the ..read more

This post is part of our SQL Server security blog series, 30 SQL Server Security Checks in 30 Days. We’re publishing a new security check every day in the month of June. Visit our sp_CheckSecurity page to learn about our free SQL Server tool you can download and run to check your own server. SQL Server database ownership may seem like an insignificant concern, but choosing the wrong owner for your database can be a main contributor to security disasters like ransomware. Let’s talk a bit about how to choose an owner that doesn’t create a huge security vulnerability for you and your SQL Server ..read more

This post is part of our SQL Server security blog series, 30 SQL Server Security Checks in 30 Days. We’re publishing a new security check every day in the month of June. Visit our sp_CheckSecurity page to learn about our free SQL Server tool you can download and run to check your own server. Transparent Data Encryption uses certificates in its architecture for protecting your data while at rest. One attribute of a certificate is they have an expiration date. Certificates expire for a couple reasons, but the main reason is to enforce security. When a website certificate expires it forces the ..read more

This post is part of our SQL Server security blog series, 30 SQL Server Security Checks in 30 Days. We’re publishing a new security check every day in the month of June. Visit our sp_CheckSecurity page to learn about our free SQL Server tool you can download and run to check your own server. When considering database security, you might find stories of data breaches involving SQL Server with reports like this. “The researchers note that the ransomware infection starts with the MS-SQL process on the compromised machine downloading a .NET file using cmd.exe and powershell.exe.” That ..read more