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Data Breach Danger

This editorial was originally published on March 12, 2015 and is being re-run as Steve is at the PASS Summit.

Recently a court in the US ruled that there was no imminent danger from a data breach at a Texas hospital. This is good news and bad news for the world, and I'm a little torn about how I feel. On one hand, it's good for us as data professionals that we aren't necessarily going to be liable for the immediate effects from lost data. While the losses aren't always our fault, we certainly could feel pressure from management if companies faced immediately legal or financial penalties.

However it's bad news because I think there's little else that data breaches do than cause harm to those whose information is lost. It can be incredibly hard to link a specific breach to a specific identity theft incident, and I see this as a way of allowing companies to escape liability for their poor security practices.

In reality, however, I have no solution to propose. As a data professional, I try to keep data safe, but it's very, very difficult. One small hole in your technical infrastructure or human employees and you can lose a ton of data very, very quickly. I know it's not lost, but copied, however you have lost control of it.

We will face more and more security incidents, and as those tasked with protecting data, I'm not sure what we can do, or should do. However, I do think that organizations can't take all responsibility, nor can they take no responsibility. The balance of how to deal with losses and issues is certainly something I hope we work out a a society.

Soon.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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Featured Contents

Datatypes and the Default Mask with Dynamic Data Masking

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This article digs deeper into the ways that Dynamic Data Masking works with different data types. More »

Unused Indexes - Are they really unused or have they just not been used YET?

Additional Articles from Brent Ozar Unlimited Blog

Tara explains when index DMVs gets reset by telling a story from her dark past. More »

2019 State of Database DevOps – Take the survey!

Database development practices are more integral than ever to DevOps success. How are we saving time, automating processes, deploying more frequently, all whilst keeping business critical data secure? Take part in the survey for an advanced copy of the research report, and a chance to win a $250 Amazon voucher. More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Data Classification in SQL Server 2019

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral Blogs

One of the areas that Redgate is working on is making data classification easier. Microsoft added some capabilities to SSMS... More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Is your SQL Server environment ready for GDPR? Part 2

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In my previous blog post of this topic, I talked about the definition of what GDPR is and also described... More »

Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

I decide to add a computed column to one of my tables. I use this code:

 ALTER TABLE dbo.SalesOrderHeader ADD WhichDay AS DATEPART(dw, OrderDate)

I want to index this column. What happens when I run this code?

 CREATE INDEX SalesOrderHeaderIX_DayofWeek ON dbo.SalesOrderHeader (WhichDay)

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

I have a Sales database that is in use by various clients. I want to set this database to the restoring state while we do some work and then make it available for clients again later. I do not want to restore the database from a backup. What can I do?

Answer: Run "BACKUP LOG SALES TO DISK = 'sales.trn' with NORECOVERY"

Explanation:

If you take a tail-log backup, using the BACKUP LOG command, you can use the NORECOVERY (or STANDBY) option to set the databse to the restoring state. Once you are ready, you can use RESTORE DATABASE xxx WITH RECOVERY to make it useable again.

Ref: BACKUP LOG - click here

RESTORE Arguments - click here

» Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Featured Script

Disk Space Check

Rinu George Philip from SQLServerCentral.com

This script will get the information of drives having free percentage less than or equal to 10 % (on all servers that are registered)

Simply run the script on a Registered Server.

Right click the Registered server (it could be DEV/QA or PROD or any other) and New Query and execute it.

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