Windows

This will be no surprise to those who have been working with SQL Server for a long time, but it can be puzzling at first and actually I was a bit confused myself when I stumbled upon this behavior for the first time. SQL Server treats windows users in a special way, a way that could lead us to some interesting observations. First of all, we need a test database and a couple of windows principals to perform our tests: [Read More]

Yesterday I upgraded my laptop to Windows 8.1 and everything seemed to have gone smoothly. I really like the improvements in Windows 8.1 and I think they’re worth the hassle of an upgrade if you’re still on Windows 8. As I was saying, everything seemed to upgrade smoothly. Unfortunately, today I found out that SQL Server services were gone. My configuration manager looked like this: My laptop had an instance of SQL Server 2012 SP1 Developer Edition and the windows upgrade process had deleted all SQL Server services but SQL Server Browser. [Read More]

If you are playing with multiple Virtual Machines and multiple SQL Server instances and features, it’s very likely that your virtual machines logon screens are showing all the users you set up for service accounts. In this case, my Master Data Services playground shows the “MDSAppPoolUser” I set up for the MDS web application: Needless to say that I will never need to logon as one of those service accounts and I would be happier if the logon screen just hid them. [Read More]

Personally, I hate having a dedicated administrative account, different from the one I normally use to log on to my laptop, read my email, write code and perform all the tasks that do not involve administering a server. A dedicated account means another password to remember, renew periodically and reset whenever I insist typing it wrong (happens quite frequently). I hate it, but I know I cannot avoid having it. Each user should be granted just the bare minimum privileges he needs, without creating dangerous overlaps, which end up avoiding small annoyances at the price of huge security breaches. [Read More]