Making sure your SQL Servers are secured against malicious users is difficult. How can you know that you’ve done enough? How do you know you’re protected from the things that actually worry you? The United States Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) publishes a set of guidelines for organizations securing different pieces of software that connect to the US Department of Defense’s networks (DoD).

When PASS announced in December last year that it was ceasing all operations from January 16, 2021, it came as a surprise to many people. For 21 years, it’s represented a global community of over 300,000 data professionals who use the Microsoft data platform. From the PASS Summit to online learning, SQLSaturdays to opportunities to network, its’s been a permanent fixture throughout the year.

Every year, Redgate’s State of Database Monitoring Report reveals how businesses and organizations are monitoring their database estates. Are they using in-house or third-party monitoring tools? Who has access to the data? What are their biggest challenges? The thousands of responses to the survey behind the report offer the answers, and also provide an opportunity to dive deeper and examine those issues at an industry sector level.

How do you handle deployment failures with a single-tenant database architecture? We’ve had a question come up from a couple of customers regarding an interesting use case with Redgate’s SQL Change Automation. In this scenario, customers say: A natural question that arises is what to do when a deployment fails against a single database. For example: One approach that seems simplest to folks is wrapping the entire multi-database deployment into a single transaction.

Why a GitHub account or an Azure DevOps subscription isn't enough to implement database DevOps. A colleague recently relayed a great question from the community: why isn’t a hosted development, collaboration, and automation environment such as Azure DevOps enough by itself to implement Database DevOps? In short, generalized DevOps development and automation tooling does an excellent job at hosting version control repositories and at enabling automation.

Sometimes, people start their DevOps journey by getting their database into source control, but then, they don’t deploy from source control. Instead, they continue their manual deployments to production. Quickly they find that the database code in their production instances and the database code in their source control system don’t match.

Options for filtering when generating migrations and when reporting on database drift help teams make the best of tricky database environments. From Enterprises to tiny startups, most developers prefer to do work in small teams these days. But when it comes to database development, teams in Enterprises often have a hard time keeping these small teams fully separate in the development process.

Like every industry sector, 2020 has been a tough year in tech. The pandemic has changed the way we work, it’s changed the way our customers work, and it’s been a rollercoaster ride. In August 2020, IDC’s Global ICT Spending Forecast 2020 – 2023 predicted 2020 revenue in the sector would fall to $4.8 trillion compared to its original estimate of $5.2 trillion.

December 1 saw the introduction in New Zealand of the Privacy Act 2020 which not only brings increased protection for individuals but also has some new implications for businesses, including increased fines for non-compliance and the reporting of serious privacy breaches.

Looking to level up your performance tuning game? Check out three new videos on tempdb, unstable query plans, and identifying blocking chains with SQL Monitor. I got to work with some of my favorite folks from the SQL Monitor team last week to build some new workload patterns for our online monitoring demo site. Here are three videos sharing some highlights of performance tuning features in SQL Monitor.