The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Tracy Boggiano
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
30 SQL Server Security Checks in 30 Days
Our first topic was a series via Straight Path Solutions on 30 SQL Server security checks in 30 days. There are some good things to keep in mind while going through this series. That said, I’d highly recommend Solomon Rutzky’s Module Signing over anything to do with cross-database ownership chaining.
UNISTR() and || in Azure SQL Database
The second topic was a blog post about two new additions to T-SQL in Azure SQL Database: UNISTR() and ||. The || operator acts very similarly to the + operator and serves to concatenate two items together. || is the ANSI SQL standard, so that makes it a perfectly reasonable addition to the syntax, though I’ll use CONCAT() and FORMATMESSAGE() over || or + most days of the week.
The other addition is UNISTR(), which lets you escape Unicode characters. Solomon had a good explanation of why he’s not the biggest fan of this change.
SQL Server Linting
Our final major topic was thanks to Tracy: linting in SQL Server. Tracy recommended super-linter as a project for linting in a wide variety of languages. In this broader project, there are a pair of linters for relational databases, and Tracy’s preference is SQLFluff. We explained what the purpose of a linter is, looked at some linting rules, and got derailed on “usp_” and passive voice, as is my wont.