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Script DB Level Permissions v4

The Voice of the DBA

The Younger Generation

There are concerns about the next generations of security professionals. The average age of people working in information security is high enough that there is a concern that not enough younger people are entering the profession to meet the demands of the growing security challenges we face.

I wonder if we should we worry about database professionals as well? I have no idea of the average age of data professionals, and I'm not sure we could even get good data. After all, many companies don't hire DBAs, or they have developers working extensively with data in a way that we would think of them as data professionals.

There are always likely to be plenty of people that are willing to develop software and work with data. Even the data science area, where there seem to be few qualified people, is attracting lots of people with a passing interest and a little skill in querying data. However are we getting people that are willing to devote themselves to becoming experts at this craft.

I think that's my concern. It's one I hear Jeff Moden express over and over as well. We find that we have more and more people working in this profession, making their living as a SQL Server focused employee, but they don't have in depth knowledge of SQL Server. I'm not concerned about the guru level understanding of memory clerks, but rather the basic understanding of writing T-SQL, of understanding how and why to use the various types of indexes, of even just being able to get the current date and time.

I know there will always be new people coming to work with SQL Server who will become experts. However I'd hope that we'd have more and more of them percentage-wise, rather than what seems to be fewer and fewer of them.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

In SQL Server 2014, I am trying to determine if a database is a snapshot programmatically. What should I do?

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

I have this code:

 CREATE TABLE DDM_Questions ( myemail VARCHAR(300) MASKED WITH (FUNCTION='email()') ) GO INSERT dbo.DDM_Questions ( myemail ) VALUES ( '@dog.com' -- myemail ); GO CREATE USER ddmtest WITHOUT LOGIN; GO GRANT SELECT ON dbo.DDM_Questions TO ddmtest; GO EXECUTE AS USER = 'ddmtest' SELECT * FROM dbo.DDM_Questions; GO

What is returned from the final SELECT?

Answer: @XXX@XXXX.com

Explanation:

The email mask works by building a string as follows:

The first character of the value in the column is included.
Next there are 3 Xs appended
An @ symbol is next
4 Xs are added
.com is the end of the string.

In this case, that means the first character (@) is returned, then the XXX@XXXX.com is next.

Ref: Dynamic Data Masking - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt130841.aspx

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Featured Script

Script DB Level Permissions v4

S. Kusen from SQLServerCentral.com

This is a replacement for http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Security/71562/ which is corrupt and SSC cannot get it to be editable for me.

This T-SQL code will script out database and object level permissions to help make it easier to backup and restore databases, and subsequently restore the permissions. A primary use case would be to restore a production database to a lower environment where users have more permissions in the lower environment.

You could then:

1. Script out the permissions using this script in the lower environment.
2. Restore the database.
3. Restore the permissions from the output from step 1.

It seems to work on SQL 2005-2014, so have at it and let me know in the comments if you come across any problems, and I'll be sure to update the script.

Hope you enjoy!

Steve

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