Voice of the DBA

Tag: SQLNewBlogger

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

Lots of people have never worked with LocalDB, which is an in-process version of SQL Express. No service account, just a SQL Server instance running with your app. It’s a nice lightweight way to get SQL Server running quickly without a hassle.

This is a SQL Server Express version, but the bare bones for development. This post looks at how you can get this running.

This version of SQL is installed with SQL Express, and with Visual Studio. If you look in this path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\150\Tools\Binn, there is a SQLLocalDB.exe. You can see that here.

This is my SQL Server 2016 version of LocalDB. I can start a new instance by calling this with the CREATE option. I can give this a name as well, as I might want to stat multiple instance for different apps. Here I’ll create an instance called app1.
```
SQLLocalDB create app1
```
I then call the same command, but use START instead of CREATE. You can see this reports as started from the CLI. I also add the INFO call to get status.

Now I can connect. I use (LocalDB)\app1 to connect:

I see I’m connected to a version of LocalDB then:

Now it’s just an instance of SQL Server I can use.

SQL New Blogger

I needed to check something for a customer and realized I hadn’t started LocalDB in a long time, so I needed to check the docs. I spent 10 minutes putting this post together.

An easy type of post for any of you out there. Learn something, try something, write something.
March 28, 2022
Changing the Owner of a Database #SQLNewBlogger
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

I had an authorization issue with my account, and I decided to delete it and re-add it. That’s the subject for another day, but before I could delete it, I had to remove the ownership of some databases. You can’t delete a login that owns databases.

I realized I wasn’t sure how to do this, so I wrote this post.

A Deprecated Proc

There used to be a dbo.sp_changedbowner proc that was used, but I know this is deprecated and it shouldn’t be used. It likely would work fine in SQL Server 2019, but I also know there should be more modern code. I decided to look, as I ought to know what is recommended these days.

In searching around MS Docs, ALTER AUTHORIZATION comes up in the list. I checked, and this allows me to transfer the ownership of a securable, which a database is one of the items in the list. Example F shows what I want to do and uses this code:
```
ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON DATABASE::dbname TO [login]
```
I can replace dbname and login with the values I need.

Which Databases?

I have a lot of databases, and I don’t need to change them all, though I could. In my case, I decided to get a list of databases and owners. If you query sys.databases, there is an owner_sid column. If you join that with sys.server_principals, you can do so on the SID column. This query shows me what I need:
```
SELECT d.[name], sp.[name] FROM sys.databases d
  INNER JOIN sys.server_principals AS sp
   ON d.owner_sid = sp.sid
```
The results are here:

In some sense I hate that “sa” isn’t the default owner, but I get it. There might be a need for other accounts. However, my account is a sysadmin, so my view here is that “sa” ought to be listed.

I digress. Now that I have a list, I can limit it to my account with a WHERE clause. I can take that list of items and build the code. I could use a cursor, but this is a one-off task, so this works:
```
SELECT
                'ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON database::' + d.[name] + ' TO sa;'
              , d.[name]
              , sp.[name]

FROM
                sys.databases d
     INNER JOIN sys.server_principals AS sp
         ON d.owner_sid = sp.sid

WHERE          sp.name = 'ARISTOTLE\Steve';

GO
```
This gives me the code in the results I want to run. I copy paste this and I have a bunch of statements to run.

Despite Grammarly not being happy, this worked fine.

SQL New Blogger

As soon as I realized I needed to do this, I knew there were two posts here. One on the removal and adding back of my Windows account, and the second on this topic (when the first didn’t work).

This took about 15 minutes extra, finding the docs and writing some code, but it’s a good example of where a small situation that occurred helped me find something to write about. Easy for you to take little tasks like this and document your knowledge when you learn something.
March 14, 2022
Getting a Day Difference in PowerShell–#SQLNewBlogger
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

SSMS froze on me the other day. Actually, it lightly responded to some things, but the window wouldn’t redraw and I couldn’t see the query window. I could see the results pane, but couldn’t get the app to respond.

I wanted to get the difference between two dates, and wasn’t sure, so I quickly searched. I tried assigning the date to a variable, but this creates a string:
```
$start = “2020-03-11”
```
With a couple searches, I learned I can use Get-Date to get a date variable. In this case, I’d do this:
```
$start = Get-Date -Date "2020-03-11"
```
If I did that with two dates, I could get the difference. Here’s a screen show that shows I get the result in a variety of different time slices.

If I wanted just days, I could do this:
```
($end - $start).Days
```
That returns just the 712.

I also learned I could shortcut this with a TimeSpan type.

New-TimeSpan -Start “2020-03-11” -End (Get-Date)

I get the same spread of time parts as the image above, or I can enclose this all in parenthesis and then call the “Days” property to get that value.

SQL NewBlogger

I hadn’t done much with date and time in PoSh, and after seeing an article from an author, I investigated a bit more. This was a part of what I tried to do, albeit as a response to something not working as expected.

Good to know how to work with dates, as I can see this being a part of many PoSh scripts that might clean up old files or otherwise take action based on time values.

You could write this post in about 10-15 minutes and show how you use PoSh to work with date and times.
February 21, 2022
Checking if a database has a master key–#SQLNewBlogger
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

I’ve been working with encryption in SQL Server for a long time, and have delivered quite a few presentations on the topic. Recently I was updating some code and wanted to check if a database had a master key created in it. This post shows how to do that.

The DMK (Database Master Key) is a construct that lives inside a database and provides the basis for encrypting other keys. It is a symmetric key, but created with the CREATE MASTER KEY DDL.

Information about this key is stored in a couple of places. First, it appears in sys.symmetric_keys, with the name “##MS_DatabaseMasterKey##”. You hsould see this with the AES_256 algorithm.

You can also query the sys.databases DMV for the is_master_key_encrypted_by_server c0lumn, if you keep the defaults. If you run this
```
ALTER MASTER KEY DROP ENCRYPTION BY SERVICE MASTER KEY
```
then the sys.databases DMV will show 0, even though you still have a master key, as shown below.

SQLNewBlogger

A quick post. I was updating code to make it cleaner and realized I needed to add a check for the key. In the past, I’ve just ignored the error, but I took the chance here to refactor things and also produce a quick post.
January 26, 2022