Most operating systems disclaim use in safety-of-flight applications. I wonder why. ;^)

One of my instances is on a VMWare host with between 40-70 guests. I get sub-second response from a 3TB database. But that's certainly due more to tuning than to...

Mt project plans require an end date. Hard to do this with piecemeal implementations.

Nope. Too busy. The last one I attended was four years ago.

Jeff, Guardium captures the activity and provides very granular reporting capabilities (who did what when). It's read-only as far as interaction with SQL Server. A Guardium user can't do anything...

If you work in an industry that handles PCI/DSS data, you'd better have an audit system that provides hard separation of audit functions from those who administer the data systems....

One problem with SQL Audit: it's exposed to the sysadmin. This doesn't fly with our Audit department, so we use Guardium instead.

We have thousands of servers. Each is named after a random six-character word. Each is provisioned in the domain to which it makes sense (prod, dev, etc.).

Why, you ask?...

Make sure you bring the horsepower. I ran Hashcat on a middling developer box with no GPU, and the estimate to solve was... 10 years.

An application performing on-the-fly DDL? That wouldn't come anywhere near my network.

I use a parameterized SP template for consistency and to ensure that everyone enters the same info.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you, Steve, and all of the wonderful people in this group.

I also want to send special wishes to those like me who have to...

The Guardium agent is embedded in the SQL Server process space. The actual administration and data collection occurs on a remote server, functionally separate from SQL. So there's no chance...

Also, who audits the auditor? My company requires an audit tool that can't be altered by the sysadmin. So it's Guardium for now.

We have SCCM control patch/update management. They are all (or should be) applied in the test and cert domains before release to production. Doing otherwise is a recipe for disaster.