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Handling Permissions Changes With Powershell

Drew Furgiuele has a process to store and then re-run rights grants on SQL Server databases:

Permission requirements for these environments can change over time, just like the code and data going into your databases. It’s hard to track permissions because a database permission is much more than just a user principal; database objects often contain permission definitions for GRANT and DENY states, and users may belong in certain database roles in one environment, but not another. This isn’t a big deal… until it is: sooner or later your data and code drift will be different than production, or maybe some new change really breaks an environment. Then, you’ll be asked to restore these environments to either an earlier version, or, more likely, you’ll be asked to “refresh” these editions to what is currently in production.

You probably already have a process for this, but how are you handling maintaining differences in permissions between environments? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way to quickly evaluate, store, and then re-apply permissions as part of refresh? Even better, wouldn’t it be cool if you could do this for all your databases on a given instance? Or what about all your instances in a given environment?

You can, and you can do it pretty easily with PowerShell.

My one problem with Drew’s otherwise-excellent post is that he approved far too many entry visas in the opening GIF.  100% deny, 0 problems.