Monthly Archives: February 2010

  • redgate Releases SQL Search for Free

    Chris BenardPersonal, Programming, Work

    redgate has released their SQL Search 1.0 for free, and my coworker Stephen sent our team an email letting us know about it. It is a fantastic product that integrates with SSMS and now it’s free. It keeps an index of all the text in every sproc, all the columns in every table, etc, and you can search them all instantly, limiting by type and many other options.

    These are the features they list on their page:

    • Find fragments of SQL text within stored procedures, functions, views and more
    • Quickly navigate to objects wherever they happen to be on your servers
    • Find all references to an object
    • Integrates with SSMS

    And their “Why use SQL Search?”:

    • Impact Analysis
      You want to rename one of your table columns but aren’t sure what stored procedures reference it. Using SQL Search, you can search for the column name and find all the stored procedures where it is used.
    • Work faster
      Finding anything in the SSMS object tree requires a lot of clicking. Using SQL Search, you can press the shortcut combo, start typing the name, and jump right there.
    • Make your life easier
      You need to find stored procedures you’ve not yet finished writing. Using SQL Search, you can search for stored procedures containing the text ‘TODO’.
    • Increase efficiency, reduce errors
      You are a DBA, and developers keep using ‘SELECT *’ in their views and stored procedures. You want to find all these and replace them with a correct list of columns to improve performance and prevent future bugs. Using SQL Search, you can look for ‘SELECT *’ in the text of stored procedures and views.

    If you are a user of SQL Server Management Studio, I highly recommend you check out out. You sure can’t beat the price. Check out the screenshots below as well.

  • A Lesson in How Not to Conduct Website Security

    Chris BenardPersonal, Programming

    Louisiana Tech just sent me a “reminder” email with my full username and password in there. That information is everything necessary to logon to the school student portal and get the rest of my personal information, full school transcript, etc.

    Not only do I not like them emailing my password, I don’t like that they even know my password. They should be using hashes instead. They’re doing it incorrectly.

    Here is the full email (user/pass redacted):

    Subject: Reminder
TO: <[my.school.email]@LaTech.edu>
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 10 12:35:23 CST    
From: <[email protected]>

REMINDER:

          Your BOSS PIN is: XXXXXX
          Your CWID number is: 100XXXXXX

PROTECT THESE NUMBERS!

    I sure wish they’d protect these numbers for me instead of emailing them to me every quarter.