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Have You Been Hacked?

This editorial was originally published on Oct 30, 2014. It is being republished as Steve is on vacation.

I am glad that I don't work in the retail industry as a DBA. It seems that I read about a new security breach every few weeks from some company. Home Depot, Target, Staples, the list goes on and on, and includes more and more businesses that at least some of us use regularly. It's gotten to the point where I expect that I'll need to replace at least one of my cards every year because of some data loss issue.

However it's not just retail companies that are getting attacked. According to the Q3 Dambella report, companies are having dozens of devices infected daily and seeing increasing numbers of point-of-sale (POS) attacks all the time. Even those companies that don't deal directly with credit cards and consumers are finding that they are targets of network attacks more and more. Some of these are merely vandalism, but many are intended as some sort of industrial espionage or data breach that can be used for profit.

This is the other edge of the data professional's sword. We have low unemployment and high salaries, but we are also becoming responsible and the target of blame when data is stolen. I really believe that theft detection is becoming more important for data professionals. We won't be able to prevent attacks, but we surely need to know when they have occurred and be prepared to respond.

I don't know how our profession will move forward in the future to meet these needs. Perhaps we'll become bonded like locksmiths. Perhaps we'll be bound by insurance requirements to adhere to best practices. I'm not sure any of that will help increase security, but it might help reduce the liability that we may face.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Carlo Romagnano):

I have two tables:

 CREATE TABLE a ( i INT PRIMARY KEY ); CREATE TABLE b ( i INT PRIMARY KEY FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES a );

I'd like to drop them in one shot. Which of these commands will be executed successfully?

 --1 DROP TABLE IF EXISTS a,b --2 DROP TABLE IF EXISTS b,IF EXISTS a --3 DROP TABLE a,b --4 DROP TABLE b,a

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

I create and populate this table in SQL Server 2016.

 CREATE TABLE NULLTest ( myint INT, myvalue VARCHAR(20)) GO INSERT dbo.NULLTest ( myint, myvalue ) VALUES (1, 'Steve' ), (2, NULL), (3, 'Andy') GO

Now I want to run this query:

 SELECT nt.myint , nt.myvalue FROM dbo.NULLTest AS nt WHERE nt.myvalue = NULL;

What should I SET to get this to return 1 row. I have the default settings for a US English installation already. These are:

ANSI_NULLS - ON
ANSI_NULL_DFLT_OFF - ON
ANSI_NULL_DFLT_ON - OFF

Answer: SET ANSI_NULLS OFF

Explanation:

The ANSI_NULL_DFLT_ON/OFF settings do not matter here. The ANSI_NULLS setting is what controls this. If set to OFF, then a WHERE col = NULL evalutes to true if a NULL value is in the column.

Ref: SET ANSI_NULLS - click here

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