Mike - Awesome job.

I am very impressed. I have not explored SQL 2005 encryption significantly myself yet, but have scanned a few other articles and gave up on the complexity and lack of simple solutions. Yours reads very logically and was easy to follow new terms and concepts without having to have BOL open to clarify obscure references. Yeah!

Again, I don't know enough to poke any holes, but knowing your thorough approach to new ideas, I bet you cover 99% or better of the solution. We have a few sensitive storage requirements ourselves coming up in a new project. Maybe we can experiment with this in our new solutions, I'll let you know how it goes.