Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

  • More Data Masking Options from The Foundry

    I’ve written about The Foundry before, a research group within Redgate Software. It’s a bit like Microsoft Research, but with a tighter focus on specific database related issues. One of the areas of investigation is data masking, which is becoming more important to organizations all the time as development and QA systems get breached by hackers.

    In an effort to continue their work, they’ve added a new option to the data  masking: configurable masks. This is is along the lines of the choices that Dynamic Data Masking gives you in SQL Server 2016+, but it’s built for refreshing your dev/test systems.

    If you think you want to understand the issues and how masking might help you, give the POC a try. It’s a basic representation of the problem (deployed in Azure) that you can play with and investigate the issue.

    We’d love feedback, and perhaps some of this will make it into a product, or maybe this will just be research into the issue. Either way, it’s the chance to participate and learn a few things about the problems that we face with databases.

  • Still time to enter the SQL Clone contest

    You could win an Amazon Echo from Redgate. Our contest is still open for a few days, so post a comment on my blog and take your chances. I’ll be picking from the comments next week.

  • What’s Next for SQL Clone?

    I think SQL Clone is a useful, handy product. It’s what I’ve needed in a number of organizations, or it’s what would have saved us (literally), $100,000s of dollars by avoiding larger SANs with snapshot technology. At one company, we actually bought a second six-figure SAN when our customer service people wanted a copy of our SQL Server database from a point in time overnight that they could use to respond to customer requests and test issues on the next day.

    Now that v1 is out, and many of you were impressed by the demos and details from our Livestream launch, what should we do to the product?

    Let us know: sqlclonefeedback@red-gate.com.

    We are getting feedback from some customers, we are getting a few questions here and there in presentations, at conferences, and on Twitter. However, it helps to give feedback directly in a way that we can tally things up.

    Do you need more than 2TB clones? Send us a quick email.

    Do you need better permissions and security? Send a quick email.

    Is there something else?

    As much as I like getting feedback, and Grant does, it’s good to vote with your voice and send a note to the company. If you want a louder voice, send a few emails to the salespeople. They can really put some emphasis on feature requests.

  • The Foundry–Data Masking Research

    For most of the time I’ve been working for Redgate, we’ve had some sort of R&D group that tries out new ideas. Over the years we’ve done this in a few ways, evolving things over time. I had the chance recently to meet with The Foundry, which is formally investigating ideas for feasibility, interest, and general knowledge. Not all their ideas will move forward to actual pieces (or parts) of software, but it was interesting to meet with them.

    One of the areas they’re investigating is data masking, which is a much larger topic than you might think. I got the chance to review some of their research areas and thought a few of you might be interested in helping research and giving your thoughts.

    Data Masking Demos

    In looking at data masking, the group spent some time getting feedback from individuals, trying to understand the challenges and possible solutions, and then build some interactive demos. These aren’t really software, but they are a bit more than wireframes. you can see all the demos in the Data Masking Demo section of their site.

    Each of the items deals with a different aspect of data masking. The demos aren’t completely intuitive, which is both interesting and frustrating. It’s good that there is some open-ended-ness that gets me to think. Hard that I don’t always quite get the intention. I had the luxury of getting some time where someone would sit down and explain a scenario, but I’d be curious what some of you think.

    If you have a few minutes and want to play with potential areas of data masking research, try a demo and give some feedback. I particularly think the Manage Test Cases and Realistic Generation demos are things I’d like to see engineered, particularly together. I would really like the idea of some production-like data and some real test cases being moved into good, not-production, data sets that I can use for development and testing. I’ve given some feedback, but I’ll play more and leave notes here, and at foundry@red-gate.com .

    If you have a few minutes, maybe you want to do the same.