As sometimes happens I needed to change a database password. It's a pretty straight forward process: log into your database server, find the login, change the password.
And if that were all there was to it this could qualify as a terribly boring and unuseful post.
I needed to know who and what I would be affecting. I ran traces on the SQL Servers gathering some information. That gave me a good idea what was happening during the business day and one night. But traces are expensive, I couldn't just let them run for 30 days (to cover an entire month) or 90 days (to cover an entire quarter). I would surely never capture the automatic annual update processes.
I wrote a simple module that took .yxmd files as the input (wildcard the input = *.yxmd where file format = .csv, delimiters = \0 and field length = 1000) and parsed the text looking for the SQL connection strings. Additionally, I outputted the full path. After a filter and a unique I had a list of modules, the login they used to connect to the database and which database they connected to.
I work with a great bunch of people (and people that have more permissions on the servers than I do!). Jeff took the module, ran it on all the servers we know to house modules and provided me with a list of every module that would be affected by my password change.
Now I don't have to wait and be reactive. We know what will be affected and we can plan our actions accordingly.
