Category: Cloud

Kavitha Jonnakuti announces a new feature for Azure SQL Data Warehouse:

Access to the table columns can be controlled based on the user’s execution context or their group membership with the standard GRANT T-SQL statement. To secure your data, you simply define a security policy via the GRANT statement to your table columns. For example, if you would like to limit access to PII data in your customers table, you can simply GRANT SELECT permissions on specific columns to the ContractEmp role:

GRANT SELECT ON dbo.Customers (CustomerId, FirstName, LastName) TO ContractEmp;

This capability is available now in all Azure regions with no additional charge.

This has been in regular SQL Server for a long time, so it’s good to see it make its way into Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and in a manner which doesn’t involve creating user-defined functions for predicates like Row-Level Security.

Janusz Rokicki explores what is available in Azure SQL Data Warehouse when it comes to auditing:

Auditing is disabled by default and the UI experience depends on the region to which the logical server is deployed. For instance, in UK South, the portal offers no options to manage auditing:

In North Europe, the portal allows Table Auditing (table-storage based) to be enabled on the SQL Data Warehouse scope, but it isn’t possible to enable Blob Auditing:

On top of that, Blob Auditing behaves differently when enabled on a logical server level in different regions. In locations that support Table Auditing, turning on Blob Auditing automatically enables it in all databases, including SQL Data Warehouses—and that’s expected. In other regions, Blob Auditing is not automatically enabled and has to be turned on programmatically by calling ARM REST API.

I imagine the plan is to support this across the board but it’s rolling out region by region.