Privacy has been an increasing concern in information technology, and many companies have policies in place that prevent data that could identify a person from being easily accessed. This data is called PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Laws like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in particular are restrictive of how PII data can be accessed
If these laws are strictly interpreted, it can cause concerns even with staightforward database tasks, such as making a copy of a production database available for development work. Some companies now forbid this common and useful practice.
Using a script such as ##Common_PIIInfoDelete can diminish these concerns. This script will update all fields identified as PII to a neutral value (such as an empty string).
I've included a sample that shows how to call ##Common_PIIInfoDelete. Before you run it, please note the following:
- This must, of course, never be run in any production database. There's a validation in the script that checks the server name which should be configured for your environment to prevent this.
- You'll need to update the values in the ##Settings table to match the fields that you want to mask
- It currently runs all the updates in one chunk. It could be improved by using the primary key of the table to run in chunks.
if object_id('tempdb..##Settings') is not null drop table ##Settings
Create Table ##Settings (
Table_Schema sysname
,Table_Name sysname
,Column_Name sysname
,MaskValue varchar(50)
)
-- Now, insert into the ##Settings table. These values will be used when calling the stored procedure
Insert into ##Settings
-- (Table_Schema Table_Name Column_Name MaskValue
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
select 'dbo' ,'CCDetailLog' ,'FirstName' ,'''''' union all
select 'dbo' ,'CCDetailLog' ,'LastName' ,'''''' union all
select 'dbo' ,'CCDetailLog' ,'Address1' ,'''''' union all
select 'dbo' ,'CCDetailLog' ,'CustomerEmailAddress' ,'''''' union all
select 'dbo' ,'CCDetailLog' ,'CreditCardNbr' ,'convert(varbinary, '''')' union all
select 'Payment' ,'CCDetailLog' ,'PhoneAreaCodeNbr' ,'''''' union all
select 'Payment' ,'CCDetailLog' ,'PhoneLocalNbr' ,'''''' union all
select 'Payment' ,'CCDetailLog' ,'PhoneExtensionNbr' ,'''''' union all
select 'Stage' ,'CCDetailLogStage' ,'LastName' ,'''''' union all
select 'Stage' ,'CCDetailLogStage' ,'Address1' ,'''''' union all
select 'Stage' ,'CCDetailLogStage' ,'CustomerEmailAddress' ,''''''
-- Call the stored procedure to mask the PII values
exec ##Common_PIIInfoDelete