I am proud to announce the creation of a new virtual user group: the Azure Florida Association. The missiong of this group is to bring national and internaional speakers to the forefront of the Florida Azure community. Speakers include Microsoft employees, MVPs and senior developers that use the Azure platform extensively. How to learn about meetings and the group Go to http://www.linkedin.com/gro... First Meeting Announcement Date: January 25 2012 @4PM ET Topic: Demystifying SQL Azure...

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If you were listening to the waves generated by Microsoft at its Worldwide Partner Conference you probably realized that the announcement of offering Windows Azure in a box (a big, big box) is an interesting move. WAPA, or Windows Azure Platform Appliance, is the latest announcement of Microsoft's cloud offering. It basically consists of the complete Azure offering in chunks of expandable mini data centers (hundreds or thousands of servers at a time). So while that's not for your personal home computing...

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Using SQL Azure for your applications is relatively straightforward. All you need is... a connection string... and since SQL Azure uses TDS as its underlying communication protocol, just like SQL Server, it may seem natural that you don't need to change much in your application design approach when connecting a SQL Azure database. However, this may not necessarily be true. SQL Azure was designed for ease of deployment and scalability; and as such you may need to take certain things into consideration...

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Just in case you are around... please come to the SQL Saturday in Tampa, FL on Saturday January 23rd. I will be there!!! And many other SQL Server speakers. Visit http://www.sqlsaturday.com/... for more information... Many topics will be covered including SSIS, ELT, Powershell, SQL Azure, CTEs, Dashboards, Service Broker and many more

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A few weeks ago I was part of a meeting that outlined some of the challenges that Agile development was inducing on an existing corporate infrastructure. And Cloud Computing became a possible solution to the fast pace changes required by Agile development initiatives. Agile projects tend to be short in nature, with fewer documentation and evolving requirements. From a project management standpoint, development cycles are divided in Sprints, which can be a couple of weeks long in certain cases. The...

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As I am digging more into SQL Azure, it seems choices for auditing will become a little bit more restricted. Generally speaking there are four ways to audit SQL Server statements; these mechanisms are used by various software vendors to deliver auditing capabilities for compliance mandates and for security reviews. However as we will see, many of the products will stop from working for SQL Azure due to some limitations imposed by the database. At a high level, the four auditing mechanisms are: Server-side...

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While SQL Server security features continue to improve, hashing in SQL Server using native functions is simple, but not necessarily up to speed on the latest security specifications. The good news however, is that using extended stored procedures allows database developers to take advantage of the strength of .NET using the System.Security.Cryptography namespace. I started to evaluate Hashing capabilities within SQL 2005 and 2008 and as it turns out, hashing is extremely simple using the HASHBYTES...

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Scott Klein (http://geekswithblogs.net/... and I are organizing the first SQL Saturday of South Florida, coming on August 8th 2009. It will be held in Miramar at Devry University. If you are in the area, please drop by! We have over 20 speakers and a great deal of giveaways. To find out more, please go to: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/... Thanks Herve...

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Many organizations are faced with the threat of data theft, from which legal battles, hefty fines and negative publicity can arise. Interestingly enough stealing data is not always that difficult. In this post we will review certain aspects of data masking, a technique used to disguise personable and sensitive information. Data masking encompasses two key areas: in-flight and at-rest. In-flight data masking is different than encryption; the goal of this technique is to temporarily transform data...

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I have seen an interesting issue surface recently, one that many other corporations are probably facing: the dividing forces of security and auditing. It could be argued that auditing practices should strengthen security, however this may depend on the situation. Let's take database access control as an example. In a typical two-tier application, connections established to a database server are performed using a shared account. Usually, shared accounts are considered less secured than network accounts...

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