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SQL Server Database Development

Could SQL Injection be dangerous even when perfectly safe?

SQL Injection is something I would expect any reader of my blog to be familiar with. Despite being one of the oldest database attack methods, it still persists for decades on the OWASP Top Ten list of critical security risks to web applications.

In fact, instead of dying out, it only seems to be getting more clever and even automated. With “hacker bots” scouring the web and automatically probing for injection vulnerabilities to exploit. I know, as I’ve once been a victim of such attacks in the past.

But today I’m not actually going to talk about that. Today, I’m going to ask the question: When is SQL Injection dangerous, even if it’s perfectly safe?

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T-SQL Tuesday #152 – Which version of my database was deployed? It depends!

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Deb the DBA (b|t), who invites us to give a long rant about a question that a coworker could be asking us, without knowing what they’ve just gotten themselves into by doing that.

Well… I’ve got just the thing 🤭

Read More »T-SQL Tuesday #152 – Which version of my database was deployed? It depends!

Should the Database and Application projects be in the same Repository?

Following the rise in popularity of DevOps for Databases, many interesting questions are being asked on the topic.

One of these questions is: Should your SQL Database project be in the same source control repository and solution as the App code project? Or maybe they should be in the same repository but separate solutions? Or maybe they should be in completely separate repositories?

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Filtered Indexes with TRY_CONVERT, ISNUMERIC, and other complex expressions

Who doesn’t like Filtered Indexes, am I right? They’re pretty great, honestly. If… of course… you’re able to actually create them and utilize them in your specific use cases. That… unfortunately, could often become a complicated, if near impossible, task. So, what if our use case is not trivial enough to allow for filtered indexes?

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Finding a use for Extended Properties in SQL Server

“Extended properties allow you to add custom properties to database objects”, so says the official Microsoft documentation. However, very few DBAs make use of them, if at all. This is actually a good thing, because indeed the scenarios in which this feature could be useful are relatively few and rare.

On the other hand, I also see DBAs essentially jumping through hoops to implement something, which could in fact very easily be implemented using Extended Properties.

What are these peculiar use cases? Let’s look at a few examples.

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Even more fun with DATETIME arithmetics!

In one of my previous posts, Fun with DATETIME Arithmetics, I introduced a way to use “math” to manipulate datetime values for effectively generating, calculating, and displaying intervals (i.e. difference between two datetime values). These mostly work with the addition and subtraction operators (+, -).

In one of the paragraphs, I mentioned multiplication and division, and posed the question about why anyone would ever need to do this.

Read More »Even more fun with DATETIME arithmetics!