Disable Saving/Exporting Results of TSQL Query in SSMS

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Disable Saving/Exporting Results of TSQL Query in SSMS

Summer90

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November 11, 2022 at 8:17 pm

#4111793

Has anyone found a way to disable the ability of certain clients to save or export the results of a SQL query in Management Studio?

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Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004340 More actions · Answer 1

Not that I've ever heard of.

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

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frederico_fonseca SSCoach Points: 16154 More actions · Answer 2

if they have direct access to the databases there is no way for you to prevent them from extracting the data. (other than using a tool like CyberArk which can give the users a RDP session with SSMS and on this can you can limit them to use SSMS only without any access to the filesystem)

Eirikur Eiriksson SSC Guru Points: 182911 More actions · Answer 3

Summer90 wrote:

Has anyone found a way to disable the ability of certain clients to save or export the results of a SQL query in Management Studio?

The answer is "no can do", if results are displayed on the user's screen in any way, shape or form, then those can be exported.

😎

Even an RDP session using the likes of CyperArk can be screen-scaped 😉

Jeffrey Williams SSC Guru Points: 90303 More actions · Answer 4

Summer90 wrote:

Has anyone found a way to disable the ability of certain clients to save or export the results of a SQL query in Management Studio?

If you have clients or users that have direct access through SSMS - and you cannot trust those clients or users to safeguard the data, then you really need to ask yourself why you have given them that level of access.

The only way to prevent them from exporting the data is to not let them have access to the data. And that goes for application access too - if the client/user cannot be trusted with the data then they cannot be trusted accessing that data through any means. And don't think that just giving them access through the application will prevent them from 'exporting' the data. A simple printing of a report is exporting the data - saving a report as a file (PDF, Excel, Word, etc.) is 'exporting' the data.

And as someone else pointed out - screen scraping cannot really be blocked either. Don't forget that everyone now has a camera and can just take a picture of the screen and 'export' the data.

Jeffrey Williams
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”

― Charles R. Swindoll

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