Great article. I also second the idea of an "Implications of changing or disabling SA account" article. I've been looking for that information but haven't come across anything yet.

Another question, everyone so far has only mentioned using standard characters for the password. I use a password vault app (keepass) to store and generate passwords, and one of the options during generation is to use high ANSI characters. Using these extra characters will expand the character set available for passwords, but will it cause any problems? I typically don't use the SA account anyway and don't care about typing the password, copy and paste work fine if I really need it, is there anything else I need to worry about if using these characters in my passwords? SQL seemed to take the new password fine and I was able to authenticate again during a test. An example of a possible 120 char password is below, assuming is posts correctly.

î®é¨£Mô?Oj±9L?«¦Sórõy9?gnsÈa¤*ïÙ¹Ou²?±?pD?V?û????§ÇÞÚ?ÌÕT0£?ó#ãM¿?Ä×õ²àªaF»Vó*äÙI??'rÏúd?èÎWg®~q&f«§B±t%møky?miÅ?©?mÖ8IÃ