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.

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. What is 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. What is 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.

Recently I developed a few PowerShell commands to make it possible to enable data masking for databases. The commands were originally written for the module PSDatabaseClone to enable users to automatically mask the data for a database image. The reason the commands were created was that the cloning process would otherwise expose production data to other users which is not preferable. The commands were released and picked up by Chrissy LeMaire who implemented them in dbatools and even improved them.

This series has been a long time coming. I have been struggling with continuous integration and continuous development for a while and I want to share my process, techniques, and tips and tricks with you. I will publish several blog posts about this process because we cannot go through all of it at once. It would lead to a TL;DR article that nobody will read. The first part will be setting up the project/solution for your database.

This month’s TSQL Tuesday is hosted by Malathi Mahadevan (w | t) and she asks us to write about one thing you want to learn that is not SQL Server. As a database administrator in SQL Server you might think it’s easy to think we only deal with that technology. But the role of the database administrator has been changing for a while now and we need to know more about other technologies besides SQL Server.