The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, Sarbanes–Oxley, Sarbox, or SOX is a regulation created to improve the quality and integrity of financial reporting. It addresses audits, financial reporting and disclosure, conflicts of interest, and corporate governance, so financial and business information is factual and accurate. Its purpose is to avoid accounting scandals like the ones in 1990s stock market.
September 25, 2013Every SQL Server database is mapped over a set of operating-system files. These files store data and log information. Individual files are used only by one database, and data and log information are never mixed in the same file. While data is stored in an MDF file, all transactions and the SQL Server database modifications made by each transaction are stored in an LDF file – a transaction log file which is an essential component of the database. Conceptually, the log file is a string of log records. Physically, the log records are stored in one or the set of physical LDF files that implement the transaction log
September 18, 2013
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a security act that sets national standards for security of electronic protected health information and protects the privacy of patient health information. In simple words, HIPAA ensures confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all electronic Protected Health Information (PHI)
September 13, 2013Configuring a safe and secure environment for your SQL Server instance is a complex task. SQL Server security must be set on the SQL Server instance, operating system, firewall, antivirus program, etc. But failing to set up security properly can bring a lot of headaches and even irreversible damage
September 11, 2013Tracking changes is an essential SQL Server security task. Besides data change history, which includes DML operations (e.g. INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE), tracking DDL changes in SQL Server, changes that affect database objects, is of high importance too. In this regard, various techniques can be used as a schema change auditing solution. One of the most common method are DDL Triggers
August 28, 2013
An accidentally dropped table may be recovered in several ways. The choice of technique depends on the resources available for the recovery. The first choice is usually a database backup. But, even if the one doesn’t exist, the dropped table may still be recovered (in some cases even quicker than with a backup).
August 15, 2013
Regardless of precautions taken to protect your SQL Server, accidents may still occur, causing serious consequences, such as data and objects loss. We will now analyze two possible ways to recover SQL objects – views, stored procedures, functions, and triggers, lost to accidental DROP statement use.
August 5, 2013Backups are the starting point for any serious disaster recovery strategy. Creating SQL database backups on a regular basis is just the first step. Equally important is to make sure they are also reliable and restorable. This is the only way to avoid unpleasant surprises in case of a disaster
August 2, 2013In the past two weeks we had some interesting Solution center articles describing Microsoft SQL Server topics – each described as the problem (or the challenge) users may encounter with SQL Server data recovery
Any of recovery options using Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio requires the availability of a full database backup. And, the backup must be restored in order to be used as a recovery data source
July 5, 2013SQL Server database auditing is not used only to address auditing requirements for compliance. It has become necessary for the analysis of database actions, troubleshooting problems, investigating the suspicious and malicious activity. It can also help preventing users from inappropriate actions – as if you had a CCTV system on your databases
There are several SQL Server auditing techniques:
June 28, 2013One of the essential SQL Server security topics is finding out who did something, what and when. Being able to provide a history of data for various auditing purposes, some of which are enforced by US laws through compliance regulations, is a serious task for any DBA. Since business policies or the compliance regulations require the auditing of data changes within a database, various techniques adapting to the requirements are used to perform database auditing. The common one is using auditing triggers in SQL Server databases.
June 26, 2013In various scenarios, a SQL Server restore a database to a point in time might be required. Typically, the following situations require this type of recovery:
In the Recover deleted SQL data from a backup or from online database files, we showed two recovery scenarios, the one from a full database backup and the other from the online database data file – the MDF file. Besides these, there is one more resource you can use when it comes to SQL data recovery – a transaction log
June 14, 2013It’s important sometimes to know and have evidence of who-saw-what on specific SQL Server instances and databases. This can be a requirement you have to provide (e.g. to comply with HIPAA regulations) and there are several ways to ensure the capture of that information
In order to capture who-saw-what in SQL Server, it is important to know what was executed on the server. Even though ApexSQL Log (a transaction log reader) and ApexSQL Trigger (trigger-based auditing tool) provide partial information, in order to get the full details on who saw what, ApexSQL Audit is the perfect tool for the job.
June 11, 2013Recovering DELETED records is something we would all like to avoid, but no matter how careful we are, it can come to that. Having regular full database and transaction log backups is a necessary practice and a great advantage in this situation, but even then, bringing back the deleted records might not be easy
June 4, 2013
SQL Server transaction logs contain records describing changes made to a database. They store enough information to recover the database to a specific point in time, to replay or undo a change. But, how to see what’s in them, find a specific transaction, see what has happened and revert the changes such as recovering accidentally deleted records
May 27, 2013
A “one-to-many” relationship is one of the most common relationship types as many real world scenarios can be represented using it. For instance, the same product can be sold by more than one supplier; a customer can have more than address, and so on.
May 21, 2013One of the common questions our customers have about auditing is – how to automate transaction log reading and have all the information you might need at hand. Another common request is – how to save the transactions I see in the ApexSQL Log grid, so I can easily filter, group, order and query them without running the whole ApexSQL Log reading process again? In case of large transaction logs, the reading process may take a long time, and I want to avoid running it each time I want to see the transactions
May 20, 2013ApexSQL Diff and ApexSQL Data Diff provide a user friendly GUI for SQL comparison and synchronization of database schemas and database objects. They both include the command line interface which provides the exact same options, and which you can use to schedule unattended comparisons and synchronizations
But, what can be done when the features that the GUI and CLI provide are simply not enough? In such cases a more flexible solution is needed and the good news is – there’s a programmable API
April 30, 2013Application deployment is not an easy task. For more complex updates, besides a new version of a database that should be deployed, a new version of the application should also be deployed, and even the environment configuration changes (e.g. IIS settings for a web application or some other server settings) and post-deployment testing might be necessary.
A complex deployment often involves a lot of manual work, which makes it slow and error prone. While these characteristics are not a big problem in a test or development environment, they are certainly unacceptable in production.
April 30, 2013
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