[From Technet] What’s new in SSMS 17.5: Data Discovery and Collection

This post is authored by Alan Yu, Program Manager, SQL Server.

We are excited to announce the release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 17.5!

Download SSMS 17.5 and review the Release Notes to get started.

SSMS 17.5 provides support for almost all feature areas on SQL Server 2008 through the latest SQL Server 2017, which is now generally available.

In addition to enhancements and bug fixes, SSMS 17.5 comes with several exciting new features:

• Data Discovery and Collection is a new feature for discovering, classifying, labeling and reporting sensitive data in your databases.
• Query Editor now has support for a SkipsRows option for the Delimited Text External File Format for Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
• Showplan has enabled the display of estimated plan button for SQL Data Warehouse.

SSMS 17.5 also includes key bug fixes to Showplan, Query Editor, SMO, and Templates, which can be found in the Release Notes.

Data Discovery and Collection

SQL Data Discovery and Classification introduces a new tool built into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for discovering, classifying, labeling and reporting the sensitive data in your databases.

Discovering and classifying your most sensitive data (business, financial, healthcare, PII, etc.) can play a pivotal role in your organizational information protection stature. It can serve as infrastructure for:

• Helping meet data privacy standards and regulatory compliance requirements, such as GDPR.
• Controlling access to and hardening the security of databases/columns containing highly sensitive data.

Data Discovery & Classification includes a set of new capabilities, forming a new SQL Information Protection paradigm aimed at protecting the data, not just the database:

• Discovery and recommendations – The classification engine scans your database and identifies columns containing potentially sensitive data. It then provides you an easy way to review and apply the appropriate classification recommendations, as well as to manually classify columns.
• Labeling – Sensitivity classification labels can be persistently tagged on columns.
• Visibility – The database classification state can be viewed in a detailed report that can be printed/exported to be used for compliance and auditing purposes, as well as other needs.

Try it out and let us know what you think! You can message us on our twitter @SQLDataTools.

from SQL Server Blog http://ift.tt/2EWrC5w