Brian Kelley

Brian Kelley is an author, columnist, and Microsoft SQL Server MVP focusing primarily on SQL Server security. He is a contributing author for How to Cheat at Securing SQL Server 2005 (Syngress), Professional SQL Server 2008 Administration (Wrox), and Introduction to SQL Server (Texas Publishing). Brian currently serves as an infrastructure and security architect. He has also served as a senior Microsoft SQL Server DBA, database architect, developer, and incident response team lead.
  • Interests: Chess, Reading, Soccer (Football), Baseball, Animals, Theology

Technical Article

CONTROL SERVER vs. sysadmin membership

In a previous blog post on Detecting When a Login Has Implicit Access to a Database, I mentioned that having CONTROL SERVER rights means having implicit rights into the databases. Robert Davis posted a comment asking if there was a difference with respect to explicit permissions between being a member of the sysadmin fixed server role and having CONTROL SERVER rights.

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2009-03-16

3,550 reads

Technical Article

You Must Trust Your DBAs

This is a follow-on post to You Must Trust Someone. My point in that post was to establish that being able to and and actually trusting your account and server administrators is a necessity. I didn't go into the business aspect of that, but basically it boils down to having a good selection process for candidates, checking out their references, ...

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2009-03-03

2,022 reads

Technical Article

You Must Trust Someone

After some recent talks with security folks and auditors, one of the things I have had a hard time getting across is that you must trust those folks responsible for account and server management when it comes to securing your data. Yes, you can put in...

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2009-02-26

2,549 reads

Technical Article

Another Reason to Avoid Cross-Database Ownership Chaining

This past weekend we were moving database files around because we added new LUNs to an existing production cluster. We went at the old tried and true way, we detached the databases, moved the files, and re-attached the databases. That seemed to work well...

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2009-02-20

2,133 reads

Blogs

I recommend Smart Brevity (book) for communications

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Following the advice in Smart Brevity improves communication.

SQL Server 2025 Developer Edition – One size fits all

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Microsoft has released SQL Server 2025, bringing big improvements to its main database engine....

Monday Monitor Tips: Learning While Using the Tool

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A customer was asking about what certain items in Redgate Monitor mean. They have...

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Forums

Switch partition: NULL boundary id

By vpolasa

I have table: t1 in schema1 with 19 billion records. I have another table...

Minimally Viable Security

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Minimally Viable Security

Encoding NULL

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Encoding NULL

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Question of the Day

Encoding NULL

What is returned from this code in SQL Server 2025?

SELECT BASE64_ENCODE(NULL)

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