Understanding SQL Server security is a critical skill. Greg Larsen explains SQL Server authentication methods, logins, and database users in this article.

Setting up and managing SQL Server security is an important part of building and maintaining your SQL Server environment. SQL Server security is a vast topic that cannot be covered in a single article. This article starts with a few foundation topics of SQL Server security: SQL Server Authentication methods, logins and database users.

Authentication methods supported

There are two different authentication methods for connecting to SQL Server: Windows and SQL Server.

Windows authentication requires a user to first authenticate to Windows with their login and password. Once a user has been authenticated to Windows, they can then connect to SQL Server using Windows authentication. That is, provided their Windows account has been granted access to SQL Server via a login (more on logins later). Windows authentication is tightly coupled with Windows Security and is also known as Integrated Security. Windows authentication works great when a person is part of a Windows domain.

#server login #sql prompt #sql server security #sql server