We've recently determined that security changes were made for a particular user in a database. We didn't have any traces or any other auditing going so we don't know what changed. We, do, however, have a recent backup from before when we believe the chang
I need to automate the auditing of my SQL Servers for blank sa passwords. What's the best way to do this? Are there any options in PowerShell? Check out this tip to learn more.
I have a SQL Server login that's been locked out. I went to unlock it, but it's telling me I have to change the password to do so. I can't change the password and I don't know what it is. How can I unlock the account without changing the password? Check
I want to parse all the files in a given directory using PowerShell. I'm looking for a particular bit of information and need to search for it in all the files. Is there an easy way to do this? Check out this tip to learn more.
I've recently been asked to identify and report on any SQL Servers listening on my network. I need to try and find all SQL Servers, not just the ones in my domain. We know there are a couple of appliances that are potentially running SQL Server and we wan
I've been charged with coming up with a quick solution to audit login changes on my SQL Servers. However, there's no budget so I'm going to have to come up with basic scripts and the like to do the work. Is this tip we cover a solution for you to audit lo
Recently I was supporting a third party application. It queries to determine what tables it has permissions to before it proceeds with the rest of its functionality. We had implemented permissions based on the best practice of creating roles, assigning th
My application doesn't use the dbo schema and I need to set the users coming into the database to use the correct schema automatically. We're using Windows groups and whenever I go to set a default schema, SQL Server gives me an error. How can I set the d
Recently I was trying to find out how someone had access to a particular database in SQL Server. When I looked at the list of users at the database level, I didn't find any that matched up either with the user's Windows account or with any of the Windows
I have data in a SQL Server database that I need to get to an older version of SQL Server. I tried the backup and restore method, but received an error indicating that this wasn't allowed. I also tried to detach and attach the database, but that operation
We recently upgraded one of our SQL Server to a newer version. When I took the backup from one of the databases on that server and attempted to restore it to our test restore server (where we verify backups), I received an error. The test server wasn't up
At my organization, servers have a very cryptic name or a name where you can't immediately tell the function. For instance, Amazon is the name of the SQL Server which our SharePoint uses as a back-end and Nile is the SQL Server hosting the databases for o
My network admins have tightened down the network and while we were once able to connect to our named instances via MySQLServer MyNamedInstance, we're now only able to connect if we specify the port. What happened and what do I need to tell them to fix th
Someone, while locking down the SQL Server, removed the permissions by which the DBAs came in and administered the server. As a result, we cannot get back into SQL Server. How can we restore our access to SQL Server? Check out this tip to find out.
I've been tasked with securing my SQL Servers and I need to write scripts to audit them periodically to ensure they are all right. Recently I learned that I need to audit for CONTROL SERVER rights on any SQL Servers I have that are 2005 or above. In this
My auditors have asked me to identify what runs when my SQL Servers first start up. In this tip we look at different things that can run when an instance of SQL Server starts.
I have a requirement to periodically audit for members of the sysadmin role across all my servers. I'd like to automate this and I've heard PowerShell is a good match. In order to feed a downstream governance application, I'd like to simply output the mem
I was recently trying to determine what version of SQL Server was installed on a particular server. I found this tip to determine the version and tried to execute the code in the command. However, I do not understand what all the information means. Could
I'm looking to install SQL Server and I know it will require a service account. In this tip we cover what should be done to configure the SQL Server service accounts securely.
I've been asked to be the data modeler for a new application and I've not done this before. I understand the idea of getting the entities and how they connect together from customer interviews, but how do I apply the normalization rules to my data model?
This tip shows how to identify who the local administrators are on each SQL Servers. This uses PowerShell and an input file to determine which SQL Servers to check.
I'm trying to set up SQL Server and I know that I'm not supposed to use an account that's an administrator on the system, as per best practices. I see that the System account is a possibility, but I've been advised not to use it. Why not? Check out this
I'm a developer and in a given database I can't see a table I know is there. The reason I know it's there is I can execute a stored procedure which queries the table and I never get an error executing it. What's going on?
In Active Directory our administrators are able to audit password age to see when accounts last had their password changed. Most of our service accounts are set up to not expire passwords because we change them less frequently than we require users to do