As posted here, my presentation last month at Chicago Sql Server User Group was cancelled due to some technical issues. So I will present again in our next Chicago Sql Server User Group meeting on Thursday, 01/12/2005, at Microsoft’s downtown Chicago office on Wacker Drive. The session will start around 5:30pm. Free pizza and soda…

With SQL Server 2005, you can rename your logins, including sa. To me, this is a HUGE security enhancement. For mixed security environments, many Sql Server attacks take advantage of the sa account, either by brute-force or dictionary attacks. I highly recommend you to rename sa to something that is discreet to minimize attack surface…

Sometimes you may have the need to find out the date and time a particular database was last restored. Here is a simple way to do it. It should work in both SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005: use msdb select max(restore_date) from restorehistory where destination_database_name = ‘MyDatabaseName’

By now you probably can tell that I am a big fan of sqlcmd;) Here is one more nugget on sqlcmd that I can throw at you: You can set a variable so that sqlcmd would run a query whenever you launch it from the command line interactively. For example, you can let it run…