SQL Saturday 294 Philadelphia, Nostalgic!

Less than a week left and I’m extremely excited about SQL Saturday in Philly on June 7th, 2014 and the Precon the day before (I signed up for Allan Hirt’s).  I lived in Philadelphia for about 10 years during which I went to college, had my first two full-time jobs, and my first to kids were born in that area. This SQL Saturday is going to be a blast from the past for me.  The actual event takes place in Malvern PA which is off of 202 in the Northwestern Region of the Philadelphia suburbs.  It is part of the “mainline” and close to Valley Forge, King of Prussia and other historic/tourist attractions.  I used to work in the Mainline area for Johnson Matthey in Wayne (and part time in Malvern) so I’m very excited about taking this trip back to visit friends and family.

For those of you that don’t know about SQL Saturday it is a fantastic event. Here are some of the reasons I’ve encouraged people to attend SQL Saturday events:

 

SQL Saturday in Washington D.C. December 8, 2012

This is my first time attending a SQL Saturday event and I’m quite excited. If you live in or near the D.C. Metro area I hope to see you there. If you have not registered, you still have a chance:

http://sqlsaturday.com/173/eventhome.aspx

I’ve put together a short list of the sessions that I am planning to attend with some brief reasons why. Hope to see you all there!

 

Listing server and database roles for all logins and users in SQL Server – Part 3 – Using SSRS Reports to Monitor and Fix security problems

Finally the epic conclusion to my three part series about listing server and database roles. In this post I will show you how to create SSRS report to use for regular tracking or auditing purposes. This is a much easier and cleaner way of looking at the data and you can provide it to other team members or even your manager.

You can read Part 1 here if you haven’t yet.
You can read Part 2 here if you haven’t yet.

 

Listing server and database roles for all logins and users in SQL Server – Part 2 – Remote Servers

Building upon the code in my previous post, I will be retrieving permissions information from remote servers that I have access to. This was a little more difficult to accomplish because security is different on different servers and I did not want to create Linked Servers with escalated permissions. Read only SQL users was an option, however there is no good way to make sure that these users will have read permissions on all current and future databases. It took a while to over come these challenges but I got it working; obviously since I have this blog post.

You can read Part 1 here if you haven’t yet.

 

Listing server and database roles for all logins and users in SQL Server – Part 1 – Local Server

I was approached with a unique problem to solve; find out who has what permissions on my Database Servers.  This is the first post in a three part series about finding all user permissions on your SQL Server instance. The next posts will build upon this and introduce a way to use the same queries to get permissions from remote servers.  In the final post, I will create a report that will nicely display the results of all those queries making it easy to audit and fix security problems. The granularity I’m going for is mapping logins/users to their corresponding roles at the instance and database level.

 

Create a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Catalog Report in 15 Minutes

One big question I have gotten often is “I need data, what kind of reports do you have?” It is a valid question from a user, especially with a server that may gave hundreds of reports. The solution? Create a Reports Catalog Report. I have provided the simple instructions and code to create this report in 15 minutes or less.

 

SSRS Report Usage Statistics

The first job I got out of college was what introduced me to SQL Server Reporting Services. Initially I thought the job was a less technical reporting analyst position with a focus on competitive/business intelligence.

I found myself loving the technical work more and more; my concentration was in DBMS in college so this just built upon that love. Although I don’t work with SSRS as much anymore, I still love going back and doing report development, maintaining the reporting environment, and looking at report usage stats.