It’s been over two years since our last weekly webshow, and some of us have missed it. Some of us haven’t noticed it’s gone. Some of us are golden retrievers (I’m looking at you, Annie).
In any case, we’re using some time in our morning Office Hours to record, and so I present to you, Dimension 4, Episode 1:
This is intended to be a lighthearted treatment of a subject that is, in some areas, very serious. We recognize the gravity. But we must also make fun of things that can be made fun of, non?
Day 0: This weekend, returned from nice, safe, fun ocean journey to find that everything is extra weird now. Donned protective gear and observed, firsthand, the lack of paper products in stores. I gather that people are eating the stuff now. Weird, because there’s plenty of vegan sausages left in the cooler.
Have determined to self-quarantine for two weeks. As some have said, this won’t look all that different from my normal life, except that we’ll run out of crackers sooner.
Note to self: investigate vegan cheese recipes.
Day 1: Am lucky; already have work from home set up (because that’s what I do). Oddly, two of my five primary housemates are AWOL (actually, AWL). Will gather them in the coming days. Meanwhile, Sean and ChildB (a codename) and I have all the vegan sausages to ourselves.
Birds still singing outside. May send a scouting team to determine whether they have caches of soap and wing sanitizer.
This is a reprint of an article on MinionWare.net. I’m posting this here because I believe in this software, and because some of you may well need it. -Jen
The webinar “Audit SQL Server Security” has passed. Watch the recording here! You can also contact our team at Sales@MinionWare.net for questions, personalized demos, and a trial.
SQL Server audits come in many forms.
There’s the basic inventory, “what exactly do we have and what versions?” audit, for general use and SQL Server licensing.
Recurring security audits, which are an excellent idea in this day of hackers and attackers and random employees dropping your custom views (I’m looking at you, Steve-in-accounting).
Compliance audits, where you have to check off a number of criteria for every single SQL Server instance in your shop.
And, there are the deeply painful audits, where – for some unholy, unknowable reason – the auditor requires screenshots of all security screens. All of them. Every login and user on all 25 (or 150, or 500) instances.
The whole point of automation and centralization is to free you up from the drudge work. To give you time to pursue your ongoing SQL education, do code reviews, to create. As necessary as they are, audits are definitely drudge work that needs to be audited. So we did, with Minion Enterprise.
M.E. keeps a basic inventory for you – you enter the server names into the dbo.Servers table, and the system runs out to get all the meta-info it can about that instance: version, edition, cores, memory, disk, databases, objects, security, and on and on.
Recurring security audits are a whole lot easier, because all the data is in one place. A couple of queries, and you’re done. Better still, M.E. comes with alerts installed. New person gets sysadmin on any server? You get an alert, even if it was a Windows login that got sysadmin through Active Directory group memberships. (Oh yeah…M.E. gets you AD info, too.)
We’ve completely coded in some compliance audits, with more on the way. For those, just run a single stored procedure, and you’re done.
The deeply painful audits are automated, too. Automated, my friends.
