Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL

ADS Copilot Experiments with XML

I sent some code to a customer recently to help them decrypt some stored procedures. I sent a quick and dirty set of code, noting at the bottom that the results were in XML and needed to be extracted.

The customer wrote back that my code produced XML and the procedure code had to be copied and pasted into SSMS to create a decrypted procedure.

Before I spent time on this, I decided that I should play with Copilot here. This is the perfect place and it’s what I’d hope at some point if I sent that code, the other person would use some sort of AI to help them fix things.

Maybe not, but here’s what happened.

This is part of a series of experiments with the ChatGPT and other AI systems. Lots of Copilot lately.

Asking for Help

I could look up the syntax for working with XML, but what about Copilot? Let’s see what happened.

An interesting suggestion. One problem: when I run this, the result isn’t great.

If I cast this as XML, or declare it, things work. At least, they don’t produce errors. But they don’t do what I wanted.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I opened the completions panel for Copilot and saw other suggestions.

Let’s try these.

Suggestion 1 looks good. If I change my declaration to be XML, this works (or cast things).

Some points for Copilot here, and I’d hope a junior would get to change the declaration or ask how to convert the variable to XML.

Suggestion two doesn’t work.

Suggestion three looks like a copy paste from a forum somewhere. However, the code works. I don’t know how this gets into the suggestions, but I am interested to know what’s happening here.

Four and fix aren’t great. They look like repeats. However, six accounts for my declaration.

Does the code work? It does.

I accepted solution 6 to see what happens. The code was added to the query window.

A Repeat

I’ve given feedback, so let’s try again. I went back to the prompt and got the same suggestion again, however when I opened the panel, I saw different items.

One doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t work. Two and three are nonsense. Four is really interesting, but not useful.

I don’t think Copilot learned anything, and I’m not even sure it is all that well trained. I don’t know if it doesn’t recognize it’s in a database editor or what. The type of language for the ADS file is SQL, so I don’t know what X# and Java are added.

I’m out of patience today. I know how to do this, so I’ll just write the code.

August 23, 2023
Decrypting Stored Procedures The Cumbersome Way
I had a client that was struggling with some encrypted stored procedures. They needed to decrypt them, which I know is a pain in the #@$%@#$@#$#@. I had to do this one. This post shows how I sent them some code to do this.

Note, SQL Compare 15 does this easier and simpler. If you own it, I’d use that instead. A future post will show how easy that it.

Setup

I tested this on SQL Server 2017/2019/2022. I don’t have older instances handy, so I can’t verify that for those. However, I ran this code in databases on each instance:
```
CREATE OR ALTER PROCEDURE dbo.DecryptionTest
WITH ENCRYPTION
AS
SELECT 2 AS Two;
DECLARE @i INT = 1;
IF @i = 2
   SELECT 3 AS Two;
ELSE
   SELECT 2 AS Two;
GO
CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[DecryptionTest2]
WITH ENCRYPTION
AS
   SELECT 2 AS Two;
GO
```
I had shown how to detect these are encrypted in a previous post.

Decryption

I had initially sent the client these links, since I was sure they’d worked at one point. I thought that SQL Server 2000 and earlier had a different algorithm. Don’t quote me on that and there’s so much Google-noise, I can’t verify this.
- https://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/simple-way-to-decrypt-sql-server-stored-procedure
- https://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/decrypt-stored-procedures-views-and-triggers
Those links don’t work, and I can only guess that either I had used different procs or these were edited.

In any case, I found a gist here: https://gist.github.com/jstangroome/4020443

This has code that does work. I ran this on my instances, and I got similar output to this on all instance:

I didn’t clean this or try to extract the value from the XML, but for the client this worked.

It’s not the cleanest or best way, but it does decrypt the procs I’ve created.
August 14, 2023
Finding Encrypted Stored Procedures–#SQLNewBlogger
I had a client ask about how to deal with encrypted stored procedures in their database. This post looks at how to find them and I’ll have future posts that show how to decrypt these and also how Flyway helps.

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

The Scenario

A client was trying to start putting their code in a VCS, but they ran into the issue that they had procedures which were encrypted. In their case someone had done this in the past and the current staff wanted to know how to get the code from production.

As a setup, here are two procs I’ve created that are encrypted:
```
CREATE PROCEDURE EncryptedOne WITH ENCRYPTION

AS

SELECT 1 AS One

GO

CREATE PROCEDURE EncryptedTwo WITH ENCRYPTION

AS

BEGIN
     DECLARE @i INT = 1;
     WHILE @i < 100
     BEGIN
         SELECT @i = @i + 1
     END
     SELECT @i / 50

END
```
These two procs don’t do anything weird, but if I try to script them like this in SSMS:

I get an error:

The error says that the text for the procedure is NULL.

The text is stored in the sys.syscomments DMV, which we can see below. This is the text that was submitted for procedures without the WITH ENCRYPTION. You can also see a NULL entry for the procedures I created above.

I can filter on this with a
```
  WHERE [text] IS NULL
```
Or I could use ObjectProperty(). This has an IsEncryted parameter I can send in with this code:
```
select name, OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id, 'IsEncrypted') AS Encrypted, OBJECT_DEFINITION(object_id) AS Code

from sys.procedures

WHERE OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id, 'IsEncrypted') = 1
```
Of course the text column isn’t needed as all the code is null here. If I wanted just a list, I’d likely only have the first two columns.

That’s it. With this script I can see those procs which are encrypted. In my case, it’s four.

SQL New Blogger

This is a quick post that shows how to find those procedures (or views) which were created with WITH ENCRPTION. I’ve run into this a few times and while this is a focused, small post, I also took the opportunity to break this into multiple posts rather than doing just one long one.

You could do this as well and showcase how you break a problem down. This took me about 10 minutes to do this post.
August 9, 2023
Finding Identity Columns–#SQLNewBlogger
I had to find a set of identity columns recently and through this would make a good blog post.

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

Getting a List of Tables and Columns with Identity Properties

Finding out which tables have an identity isn’t very easy, especially in SSMS’s Object Explorer. This property is somewhat hidden, which is annoying to me as I use them often. However, I get this is just a property.

This is, however, stored in sys.columns.is_identity. This is set to 1 if the property is set, so filtering on this is good thing. If we join to sys.columns on object_id, we can get a list of table names.

Here’s a short script to do this.
```
SELECT
   o.name AS TableName
, columns.name AS ColumnName
, is_identity
FROM
   sys.columns
   INNER JOIN sys.objects AS o
     ON o.object_id = columns.object_id
WHERE sys.columns.is_identity = 1;
```
However, there’s an easier way. There is a sys.identity_columns view which inherits from sys.columns and does the filtering for you. You can use this code instead.
```
SELECT
  o.name AS TableName
, columns.name AS ColumnName
, is_identity
FROM
  sys.identity_columns AS columns
  INNER JOIN sys.objects AS o
    ON o.object_id = columns.object_id
```
SQL New Blogger

I had to do this as a quick test for a client that wanted to do some checking of identity seeds. They asked for a list of tables to check, and I showed them how to get this quickly.

This was literally about 2 minutes to set up and about 5 minutes to write this post. Something you could easily do.
August 2, 2023