Monthly Archives: October 2018

Is your SQL Server environment ready for GDPR? Part 2

In my previous blog post of this topic, I talked about the definition of what GDPR is and also described the first two phases of Microsoft’s recommended workflow in order to be in compliance with this data regulation.

The Discovery and Manage phase was about discovering where the sensitive data was located and how it can be accessed also to create access controls to the system in compliance of the “least privilege” principle enabling only authorized access to the database system and data.

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Creating Wait stats widget on Azure Data Studio for macOS

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft released a new multi-platform tool called Azure Data Studio, this tool is the final version of SQL Operations Studio. If you are familiar to SQLOps, you probably recall that this tool 100% open source, and because of that you can customize the JSON code to do certain things the way it works best for you.

In my personal opinion, this is of the best features of Azure Data Studio are widgets. It gives the option to DBA’s or Database developers to create their own custom widgets to access SQL Server data using simple charts. The old out of the box SSMS Instance reports are good in some way, when you require to check something really quick but the lack of customization and the time they take to load doesn’t make them a really good troubleshooting tool … at least for me. I know how they work and even know how to build a custom report but I think the interface is not that responsive in my personal opinion, when dealing with an issue we need something really really fast.

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Starting SSMS with a specific connection and script file

Have you ever wanted SSMS to start and automatically and establish a connection to your DBA \ hub server and have your daily routine queries already open ready to run?

Good news, that is totally possible. SSMS actually uses the SSMS.exe in the background which has multiple options such as connecting to a specific SQL Server instance and opening a file. All these options are accessible through a few very simple command line parameters, if you are familiar with SQLCmd these parameters will like be really similar to you.

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