The security of any database can be improved. However, that likely degrades the performance of the database. The cost increases to improve database security while maintaining database performance. That is, the trade-off consists of three axes: Performance, security, and cost. The existence of the three trade- off axes means that security and performance can co-exist. However, it comes at the expense of increased cost (such as effort, planning, and system resources). Fundamentally, it is necessary to choose between a database that is secure and performing, a database that is secure and not costly, or a database that is performing and not costly. It is not feasible to choose a database that is secure, performing, and not costly.

The 7-page whitepaper “The Trade-off between Database Security and Database Performance” describes how maintaining database performance involves ensuring that end-users can get to everything that they need. In contrast, improving database security focuses on controlling the access of end-users to the available resources. Database security and performance are two of the critical quality attributes used in evaluating the service being delivered by databases to the end-users. While these attributes are highly desirable for databases, end-users often see them as almost inversely related. As database security becomes more important over time, this brings its effects on database performance to the forefront. Security methods cannot overly impact end-users. At the same time, it is not possible to sacrifice security compliance due to the risk of data breaches and the requirements to meet regulatory guidelines.

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SQL Secure discovers security vulnerabilities and permissions for SQL Server and Azure SQL databases. Find out who has access to what and identify each user’s effective rights across all SQL Server and Azure SQL Database objects. Alert on violations of organizational policies, monitor changes made to security settings, and generate security audit reports as well as recommendations on how to improve the security model.

SQL Diagnostic Manager Pro is a robust performance monitoring, alerting and diagnostics solution for SQL Server. It proactively notifies administrators to health, performance or availability problems via a desktop console, a web console add-on, and a mobile console. It provides agentless, real-time monitoring and alerting for fast diagnosis and remediation. The included SQL Workload Analysis add-on offers a granular breakdown of wait states with easy drill-down to isolate problems quickly. It delivers valuable real-time and historical data with actionable advice to improve performance. The included SQL Query Tuner add-on maximizes database and application performance by quickly finding and fixing poor-performing queries. It eliminates bottlenecks by graphically profiling critical metrics inside the database.

SQL Management Suite is a bundle of five essential products for complete SQL Server management. It covers performance, compliance, security, backup, and index fragmentation. It includes SQL Diagnostic Manager Pro (with SQL Workload Analysis and SQL Query Tuner), SQL Compliance Manager, SQL Secure, SQL Safe Backup, and SQL Defrag Manager.