Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Rights for one table

    I ran across a thread that was asking how to grant rights to a person for one table only, and not other tables.

    My response is simple:

    CREATE ROLE MySingleTableRole
    GO
    GRANT SELECT ON     dbo.MyCustomers TO MySingleTableRole
    GO
    EXEC     sp_addrolemember 'MySingleTableRole', 'Steve'

    That’s it. By default users do not have rights to any tables even if they have rights to the database. If you have a user that needs rights to one table, just grant them rights to that table.

    If the user is a member of a group that has rights to other tables, you should probably remove them from the other group/role. Then build another group for them, or for the other users. If this is the case, then your group is incorrectly being used as you have people in the group needing different permissions.

  • Top 5

    I’m back in the top 5 for the first time in a long time. I’ve been spending too much time in the forums lately, avoiding other work, but trying to answer some questions for people and help them out.

    top5

    I used to always be in the top 5, but this year it seems we’ll get a bunch of people that are working on the Question of the Day, and they’ll do a lot in a short period of time. Since those can be 1, 2, or 3 points, they can quickly amass hundreds of points in a 30 day period.

    Still, this is a good reminder to spend some time on other things, like my upcoming presentations.

  • Reading Recommendations (Twitter is cool)

    Twitter is an amazing beast. More and more I find myself getting useful information and ideas from Twitter. For someone that works at home, it’s a great window into the world outside.

    A couple days ago, a friend posted that they were looking for a science fiction book to read, and were there any recommendations. I dropped one back and didn’t think about it.

    The next day the person posted back that they liked book x, y, and z, and did anyone else have a recommendation. Four or five people chimed in and before long there was a science fiction list going back and forth in a number of tweets. A few people recommended books back to me, and I even picked up one of my own recommendations that I had read as a kid, and grabbed a sample on the Kindle App to remind me to get to it again.

    So now I have these samples on my Kindle to start reading again:

    • Daemon – Danial Suarez, and the Freedom as the next book.
    • Titan – John Varley
    • The Gunslinger (Dark Tower Series) – Stephen King, I read this a long time ago, but the recommendations from friends will have me try it again.
    • Foundation – I read this in high school or college and I recommended it, but I only read 3. There are 7, so I’ll try this one again.
    • I, Robot – Never read it. Recommended to me.
    • The Second Ship – found on an Amazon recommendation
    • Star Soldier – Another Amazon recommendation found while looking at those above.

    I’ll get to all these this year, but it’s cool to get a few recommendations.

  • Social Engineering Dangers

    DefConLogoI heard about a social engineering contest at this year’s DefCon hacker conference. The write-up said that every company targeted would have failed in a security audit, and these were some large companies, like Google, BP, Proctor and Gamble, Microsoft and more. It truly highlights the “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link” analogy being applied to companies, and I’m sure that the larger the company, the more weak links there are.

    Security is a constant battle. It’s hard to get right, and it’s hard to get people to take is seriously. Most employees don’t necessarily think that the information in a company is all that important. In fact, if you look at your databases, how much data in there do you think is really critical?

    No matter how important most of the data is, I’m sure there are some things that you would view as definitely worth protecting. I would also bet that some of that data that is worth protecting is co-mingled with other, less important data. Whether it’s in a database, on the filesystem, or somewhere else, often we have critical data mixed in with other data.

    Which means that we ought to try to protect it all. We ought to be applying strong security, and educating users that disclosing anything about the company to someone they don’t know, no matter how innocent the request, could lead to a breach of security.

    We want to help others. We want to be seen as people that make the organization function more efficiently. We can do that within the constraints of good security practices. It just takes a little effort to build the habit to stick to security procedures.

    Steve Jones