Introduction

Welcome to the SQLSurfer blog. I specialize in performance tuning, among other things, so you’ll see that focus in my posts. I still post in other places, but this gives me a chance to quickly put some thoughts down, quick posts that don’t fit into the framework of the larger sites. I’m also going to use this for some opinion posts, ramblings to be more precise. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know if there is something you’d like to see that I haven’t covered.

Security Series

SQL Server security is a big topic, but it doesn’t have to be daunting. In this series, I’ve broken it down into basic components. And some not so basic components. I don’t plan on hitting every security topic in SQL Server - there are far too many, but I’ll hit the major areas and some specialty topics I’ve worked with and researched.
I’m using my PASS East 2026 presentation as the foundation, as well as previous posts I’ve created on advanced security topics. You can refer to those posts and the PASS presentation for a sneak peak.

I was preparing a post about finding implicit data type conversions in SQL Server queries, when I had to work through a few technical issues. That post will come later, but this created an interesting diversion based on the query used to solve those problems. I’ve written about regular expressions (regex) in SQL Server before, and that was on my mind as I analyzed extracting implicit data type conversions from query plans.