Admin: Bulkadmin vs ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS

I had an application thrust upon me recently which required the user executing it to have permissions to use the BULK INSERT command in T-SQL. I was aware of the server role bulkadmin which would have been a nice sledgehammer approach to crack this nut, but I was hoping for something a little more refined. Unfortunately, the only thing I came up with was the ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS command which would grant this privilege without having the server role membership but I was curious as to what the difference between the 2 was.

As far as I can tell, there is no difference between the 2 operations and both seem to achieve the same thing. From this I assume that bulkadmin is just a wrapper around the ADMINISTER feature although I'd be interested in knowing (as I couldn't find out) if there are other permissions the server role gives you.

Lets look at the example (running on SQL2008 SP2)

-- create some test logins
CREATE LOGIN [DOMAIN\user1] FROM WINDOWS
GO
CREATE LOGIN [DOMAIN\user2] FROM WINDOWS
GO
-- lets impersonate a user
EXECUTE AS LOGIN = 'BARRHIBB\user1'
GO
-- and check the server permissions 
SELECT * FROM sys.server_permissions
GO
SELECT * FROM fn_my_permissions(NULL,'SERVER')
GO 
-- does the user have bulk op permissions? 
SELECT has_perms_by_name(NULL, NULL, 'ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS');
GO

-- lets go back to being a superuser 
REVERT
GO
USE MASTER
GO
-- how about if we just grant administer bulk operations to the user? 
GRANT ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS TO [DOMAIN\user1]
GO
-- lets impersonate that user
EXECUTE AS LOGIN = 'DOMAIN\user1' 
GO 
-- and check the server permissions
SELECT * FROM sys.server_permissions
GO
SELECT * FROM fn_my_permissions(NULL,'SERVER')
GO
-- does the user have bulk op permissions?
SELECT has_perms_by_name(NULL, NULL, 'ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS'); 
GO



-- can the user grant other users to be bulky people? 
GRANT ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS TO [DOMAIN\user2]
GO

Msg 4613, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
Grantor does not have GRANT permission.

So lets see what happens with the server role:

REVERT
-- remove the users permissions 
REVOKE ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS TO [DOMAIN\user1]
GO 
-- now add the user to the bulk admin role and check permissions again
EXEC MASTER..sp_addsrvrolemember @loginame = N'DOMAIN\user1', @rolename = N'bulkadmin'
GO
 -- lets impersonate that user
EXECUTE AS LOGIN = 'DOMAIN\user1' 
GO 
-- and check the server permissions 
SELECT * FROM sys.server_permissions
GO
SELECT * FROM fn_my_permissions(NULL,'SERVER') 
GO
-- does the user have bulk op permissions?
SELECT has_perms_by_name(NULL, NULL, 'ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS'); 
GO

NB: The main difference here is that the permission has not been explicitly granted but it is an effective permission.

-- perhaps with the server role the user grant other users to be bulky people? 
GRANT ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS TO [DOMAIN\user2]
GO

Msg 4613, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
Grantor does not have GRANT permission.

So it seems that the bulkadmin server role doesn't offer any "admin" from a security point of view which begs the question, just why would you add a user to this role rather than just explicity grant them the permission through the GRANT statement (or vice versa)?

Visual Studio: Change default browser

When debugging web apps in Visual Studio, the browser it throws up is typically your default browser. Makes sense I guess. However, once you have many browsers on your machine you may wish to change this.

This is the scenario I cam up against the other day and thanks to this article, I managed to do find a way.

Essentially, you need to right click on an ASP.NET (.aspx) page in your project, right click and select "Browse With..." and change the default browser.

 

NB: if you are developing an MVC with Razor, I found you had to just add an .aspx file to the project to achieve this goal then remove it.

T-SQL: Find missing gaps in data

I recently had solve a problem of finding missing values in a data series and at the same time, came across this article on the new Analytic Functions in SQL2012.

It turns out that there is a new function which can simplify my solution although as the problem is on a SQL2008 database, I won't be able to implement it. Still, another piece of the jigsaw.

Here, I'll present queries for each version:

USE TempDB
GO 

-- setup the table 
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[HoleyTable](
   [Date] [datetime] NOT NULL,
   [Country] [char](3) NOT NULL,
   [Val] [decimal](22, 10) NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO

 -- and some sample data
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20100131','GBP', 40) 
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20100331','GBP', 30) 
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20100531','GBP', 20)
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20101031','GBP', 50) 
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20101231','GBP', 55) 
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20100228','USD', 20)
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20100331','USD', 10)
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20100430','USD', 15) 
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20100630','USD', 25)
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20100731','USD', 55) 
INSERT INTO dbo.HoleyTable (Date, Country, Val) VALUES ('20101130','USD', 30) 
GO 

-- SQL2008
WITH RankedData 
AS
( 
SELECT *, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Country ORDER BY Date) AS rn 
FROM dbo.HoleyTable 
) 
SELECT a.Country,
   b.Date AS StartOfGap,
   a.Date AS EndOfGap,
   DATEDIFF(m, b.date, a.date)-1 AS missingdatapoints 
FROM RankedData a
   INNER JOIN RankedData b
       ON a.rn = b.rn + 1
           AND a.Country = b.Country 
WHERE DATEDIFF(m, b.date, a.date) > 1; 
GO

-- SQL2012
WITH PeekAtData  
AS
(
SELECT *,
       curr = date,
       nxt = LEAD(Date, 1, NULL) OVER (PARTITION BY Country ORDER BY date)FROM dbo.HoleyTable 
)
SELECT Country,
      curr AS StartOfGap,
       nxt AS EndOfGap,
   DATEDIFF(m, curr, nxt) -1 AS MissingDatapoints 
FROM PeekAtData p
WHERE DATEDIFF(m, curr, nxt) > 1
GO 

--tidy up
DROP TABLE dbo.HoleyTable
GO


And how about the all important question of performance? Well, here is a screenshot of the execution plans for the 2 queries where you can see the 2012 implementation does outperform its 2008 counterpart by a ratio of about 3:1.