Row-level Security Available for SQL Database

Earlier this week, Microsoft made Row-Level Security (RLS) available for SQL Database. This feature, which was released as a preview in January, allows the customer to control who has access to rows in their database table based on a user's characteristics such as identity, role and execution context.  The concept is similar to having  all the data is in one table and then using a query with predicates to decide what data is returned, the query doesn’t change only the values being used in the where clause changes.

Continue Reading →

Dude, Where's my GUI - Windows Server 2012/R2

During one of my classes, a student encountered an issue with his virtual machine (VM) which was running Windows Server 2012. After attempting multiple solutions to fix the issue the VM restarted but all that came up was the command prompt, the Server Manager tool didn’t start, there was no task bar. Holy crap, we just lost our GUI!

Continue Reading →

Clone Virtual Disk Image (VDI) as a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file

Due to some laptop issues I needed to move some virtual machines (VM) to my replacement machine but this time I decided to run them on Hyper-V. Instead of trying to convert the disk image files to VHD I decided that having a VDI and VHD copy for future would be best. Virtual Box has a command-line interface called VBoxManage that allows you to clone the hard disk image using the clonehd command.

Continue Reading →

Community Links