Another point about maintaining a system with encrypted stored procedures. If you do not keep the original script in source control you run the risk of not knowing what the actual content of the stored proc is. I encountered this a few years where the client had literally thousands of stored procs and every single one of them was encrypted to "protect" it internally. The client was continually reintroducing resolved bugs because of the inability to know what the proc was doing. Most the time whatever logic is really not groundbreaking, it is just retrieving data (or maybe some manipulation). I have also encountered some third party apps where their stored procs were encrypted and after decrypting I assumed they encrypted them to cover up the fact that they had no business writing a stored procedure in the first place. 😛