Republish: The Justification Database

Posted on October 25, 2023 by way0utwest

I’m back in New York on vacation, so you can re-read The Justification Database today.

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More Vacation

Posted on October 25, 2023 by way0utwest

It’s getting close to the end of the year, and I’m trying to take off a few days here and there to close out the year. It’s been a long year, and I don’t want to leave any behind if I can avoid it. It’s always good to get away from work, and I have worked on accepting that view.

This week I’m back in New York to visit my daughter again and see some of the last few volleyball matches I’ll see her play.

See you next week.

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T-SQL Tuesday #167 – Encryption and Data Protection

Posted on October 25, 2023 by way0utwest

T-SQL-Tuesday-LogoI missed September since I was gone half the month in Europe and busy with a roadshow.

And, I missed October, since I was busy this month and lost track of this during my travels. However, I can still write, and I love the invitation from Matthew McGiffen. It’s on Encryption and Data Protection, two things I care about and about which I’ve delivered a few presentations.

As always, T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party where you can write on a particular topic. It’s a great way to stimulate some learning and writing, but it’s also something you can catch up on later. I’ll likely write something on #166 in the future.

If you want to host, send me your interest on Twitter (@way0utwest), LinkedIn (/in/way0utwest), or email (sjones using the sqlservercentral domain).

Protecting Encrypted Data

One of the things I deal with regularly is how do you deal with encryption in your software pipeline. There are two concerns here:

  1. How do we deploy encryption keys to production from development?
  2. How do we refresh development environments with encrypted data?

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it. You can’t use the same keys in development and production because most auditors and regulatory authorities won’t see this as secure. If you have really secured development, and you are bonding developers, them maybe, but most of the time you need different keys/certificates/etc. in production than development.

This means you can’t have the key definitions (SQL Server) or asymmetric key files/certificates in version control. That makes deployment a challenge.

What I usually recommend here is that you have a separate pipeline for privileged, DBA, users who can store some of this in a separate repository and secure that.

At the same time, how do we get this data down to dev? Honestly, I wouldn’t. I’d let it come down encrypted, without the keys (those can be deleted as part of the refresh) and then add in known, secure, PII data with a dev key. The mechanics here get complex, but suffice it to say that protecting keys and keeping them out of dev is important.

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Deleting a Git Branch–#SQLNewBlogger

Posted on October 23, 2023 by way0utwest

I had someone ask me recently about deleting branches. While I had known how to delete a local branch, I had to look up how to delete a remote one. Documenting these both will hopefully help me remember this.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

Deleting Branches

Most parameters have something do to with the action, and most people might guess a –d is used to delete a branch in Git. The actual syntax for a branch named “Feature123” is:

git branch –d Feature123

You can also use a –D, though be aware that –D is the same as –d with the –force option. The –d actually aliases to –delete, so you have three options:

  • -d
  • –delete
  • -D (this will run –-force)

To delete a remote branch, you can use (with v1.7+)

git push origin –-delete Feature123

where origin is the remote name and Feature123 is the branch. This is better than the old syntax, and you ought to keep your git up to date.

You can see this working for one of my branches below:

2023-10-11 13_20_00-cmd

Git docs for branch have more details.

Use this to clean up branches if your changes are merged and you don’t need to send in any more PRs for this branch.

SQL New Blogger

This is a simple thing, but one that I don’t do often, so I wrote this as much to document it for myself as to put this out there as a piece of knowledge. If someone reads this post and asks the question in an interview, it’s likely an easy one for me to give.

You can do this, help showcase your career knowledge and control the interview. This piece took me about 8 minutes to write. You could do your own version of this topic.

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