I’m a proud member of PG.NET (Poznan .NET Group). It’s small (usually about 20-30 people per meeting), but very friendly group of smart people, who just want one thing - “to know” :-) Yesterday’s one was rather unusual because it was joined (from SQL point of view it was rather a UNION) with PLSSUG (Polish SQL Server User Group) Poznan user group, or maybe I should say – it was dominated by them, but it turned out to be really interesting (from .NET developer perspective).

First speech was by Gerard Frankowski from PSNC (Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center) Security Team. It was about Secure usage of MS SQL Server 2008. I must say that I was impressed by knowledge and professionalism of this person. Among rather regular topics like attack types, password strength, Gerard shown us a bug in MS SQL Server 2008. In a shortcut it is possible to read a part of memory occupied by MS SQL process and to see users unencrypted passwords, however you will need administrator privileges to do that. More about this problem here. Gerard has shown us on live demonstration how to take an advantage of this vulnerability, by simply attaching to MS SQL process and reading it’s memory blocks. That actually made my quite nostalgic, every time I see something like this, I’ve a memory recall of me being a kid and hacking through a save files of various games. I guess it was after I’ve just made my gold counter to 999999 in Heroes Of Might And Magic when I had one of this “I’m god of this machine” feelings :-) Who knows, maybe it was that feeling that pushed me to become a software developer ?

Second speech was by Daniel Dudek and it was about SQL Compact Edition and Sync Services. Well, title says it all, Daniel’s presentation was very interesting and quite entertaining. There were little problem’s with live presentation, but as you know, Murphy’s laws are there waiting :-) I’m not going to replicate information about this subjects because you can find everything on Daniel’s blog.