''DevOps'' (Short for Developer Operations) is one of a group of new terms such as ''Cloud'', ''Big Data'' and ''Data Scientist'' - words that are somewhere between marketing and tasks we've actually had around in other forms for years.However, working in a Distributed Environment (Both on and off premises)  like Windows Azure does bring a ...

I recently read a blog post from a technical professional who’s account had been hacked (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/all/)  – not because he used poor passwords or unsafe practices, but because the hackers used some social engineering to get around the safety he had put into ...

In foreground, attendee makes dreaded ''shoot myself'' hand sign to the speaker.I was just telling the good people of Charlotte about how they (and how YOU) need to read all things by Paul Randal (blog | twitter), except for all of his cheesy romance novels like Caress and Conquer written under the nom de plum of ...

Microsoft is working on a new Windows Azure service called “Trust Services”. Trust Services takes a certificate you upload and uses it to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data in the cloud. Of course, like any security service, there’s a bit more to it than that. I’ll give you a quick overview of how you can use this product ...

(Many thanks to Peter Gvozdjak and Dan Benediktson here at Microsoft who worked with me on this issue and provided the bulk of information for this post) Recently I had a customer inquire about some performance tuning he wanted to do for SQL Azure, and as part of that he found that it was possible to remove the “Encrypt=True” setting on the ...

Hide databases from users who shouldn't be able to see them This is a long-standing request from Erland Sommarskog which I've highlighted in previous digests. But the underlying problem keeps coming up in multiple venues, so I thought it would be good to call attention to the item one more time. Some will argue that the contained database feature ...

It is quite difficult recently for me to find some time to write a new post, so I don’t seem to be leading the rankings of the most frequent bloggers. I rarely recently have opportunity to lay my hands on the code too, so natural sources of ‘inspiration’ are less often. Hopefully this will change in 2012 and I will have more opportunities to write ...

Recently several IT industry information outlets have reported that there has been a 10-year concentrated, organized effort on breaking through computer security at some of the largest companies in the world. Government sites have also been attacked in multiple countries. Add to this the regular loss of data by banking and other industries, and ...

Back when my day-to-day duties included database administration work and enterprise architecture, I became rather obsessed with the idea of operational excellence. I read everything I could on the topic. I made a list of favorites, which became somewhat shabby over time, as I dog-eared important pages and scribbled notes in the margins. ...

Last week, Microsoft released a series of patches for all supported versions of SQL Server (from SQL Server 2005 SP3 all the way to SQL Server 2008 R2). The reason for the patch against SQL Server installations is largely a client-side issue with the XML viewer application, and for SQL Server specifically, the exploit is limited to potential ...