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…
Performance of CAST vs CONVERT
This post is a follow-up to my prior post inspecting the performance of PARSE vs CAST & CONVERT, where we see that PARSE is an order of magnitude slower than CONVERT. In this post, we’ll…
Deleting a Column: Meta-data-only operation
Microsoft’s SQL Server development team is constantly working to improve performance. One important performance optimization methodology that has been eminent in SQL Server for a long time has been making as many meta-data-only operations as…
