Identifying the Physical Location of a Row
Occasionally I’ve needed to determine the physical location of a row stored in SQL Server. The code in this post uses the undocumented feature, %%PHYSLOC%%, which returns a binary representation in hexadecimal of the location…
Auditing DDL Events
SQL Server doesn’t audit DDL events out of the box, aside from several major events which are captured in the Default System Trace. By “audit”, I mean there is no log of the data-definition-language statements…
Detecting Locked or Expired Logins
SQL Server logins can be configured to use password policies enforced by Windows. These policies include determining when passwords expire, how many invalid passwords can be entered before lock-out, etc. The T-SQL code in this…
Service Broker Queue Monitor
My previous post shows how to configure an Event Notification to fire whenever a login event occurs. The post uses Service Broker to receive those Event Notifications into a queue, which is then processed by…
Auditing Login Events with Service Broker
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of running a secure SQL Server is auditing login events – essentially capturing who’s logging in, and who’s attempting to login. Being aware of who’s logging in, and…
Auto Parameterization and Implicit Conversion
When SQL Server processes a query that can be auto parameterized, the results can be a bit, shall we say, unexpected. Auto parameterization makes an implicit conversion to numeric(10,0) when there is a divisor present…
