My T-SQL contribution for this month discusses why you should consider adopting SQL Server on Linux.
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Tracy Boggiano. Tracy invites us all to write about what we think everyone should know when working with SQL Server on Linux, or anything else related to SQL running on Linux. You can read more about the invite in detail by clicking on the T-SQL Tuesday logo on the left.
Recently a brand new command was released that could help you scan for PII (Personal Identifiable Information) in our databases.
Personally identifiable information (PII) is like the name implies, data that can be used to identify a person. It is typically actively collected, meaning the information is provided directly by the individual. Here are a couple of identifiers that qualify as PII-based data:
The idea came from a line of commands that are present in dbatools to mask data. Although these commands are great, going through all of the tables and looking through the data was a bit tedious for me. Especially when you’re dealing with databases that have hundreds to thousands of tables, you easily run into the thousands to tens of thousands of columns. So that’s how I came up with the command to scan for PII and it’s called Invoke-DbaDbPiiScan and is present in dbatools from version 0.9.819. The command returns all the columns that potentially contain PII. I must say potentially because the results still need to be assessed if it indeed contains PII. But it takes care of eliminating the majority of the columns saving you a lot of time. This information is very valuable when you have to deal with the GDPR, but also when you have to deal with things like HIPAA.
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is inspired by the blog post Will the Cloud Eat My DBA Job? by Kendra Little.
Technology has changed a lot in the past years, especially with cloud/globalization/automation. What impact has this had on your job? Do you feel endangered? Over the years I’ve seen a lot of things change with SQL Server.
I remember that somebody told me when I started with SQL Server 200 that T-SQL was never going to be a big thing. How wrong was that guy right?!
The dbatools module recently got a couple of new commands mask data in their databases. One feature with the masking commands that were not yet put in was deterministic masking.
Deterministic masking is the process of replacing a value in a column with the exact value across tables. For example, a database has multiple tables with a column that has first names. With deterministic masking, the first name that’s present will always be replaced with the same value.
The dbatools module recently got a couple of new commands mask data in their databases. One feature with the masking commands that were not yet put in was deterministic masking.
Deterministic masking is the process of replacing a value in a column with the exact value across tables.
For example, a database has multiple tables with a column that has first names. With deterministic masking, the first name that’s present will always be replaced with the same value.