Bondi Digital Publishing: Scalable Processing with Azure Cloud Services

April 12, 2015
bondiBondi Digital Publishing has relied on AIS for several years to build and enhance it’s Cloud Hosted digital magazine archive platform. Vogue, Rolling Stone, and many other magazines now have a compelling avenue for delivering content to their readers. Both back issues and new and upcoming issues of magazines are provided online in a beautiful HTML5 viewer.

The Bondi Digital Archive has grown, and with that growth new challenges have arisen. Some publishers have come to Bondi with a need to make hundreds or thousands of back issues available online as quickly as possible. However, once the back issues were all scanned, the images and metadata had to be processed before the final digital product was ready. This processing was taking an immense amount of time – sometimes up to several weeks. The publications wanted their back issues available online much more quickly than that. Read More…

Verifying SQL Permissions in PowerShell

December 21, 2012
I’ve been working with Powershell lately, and I wrote a couple of functions to help verify server permissions in Microsoft SQL Server.

Why would I want to verify server permissions instead of verifying server roles? In my case, I’m interested in knowing if a particular user is able to create a database on a SQL Server. While the dbcreator role does allow a user to create a database, there are other roles that will also allow a user to create a database, such as sysadmin. Additionally, if a user is a member of an AD Group that has the role assigned, then the role is not directly assigned to the user. In the end, I found it simplest to check for the actual CREATE ANY DATABASE permission.

In this post, we will see how to check if the current AD user has a specific server permission and how to check if an AD account other than the current user has a specific server permission.

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