Jeff Moden (8/10/2009)
In Lowell's example, it also turned a 13 byte string into a 20 byte Varbinary so it's expensive, too. But, I believe that Barry's point was simply that it is unbreakable... not like CHECKSUM at all. 🙂
So...SHA1 always returns 160 bits (20 bytes) regardless of the input. HashBytes also appears to be limited to 8000 bytes of input - 8000 ANSI characters or 4000 Unicode. Finally, it doesn't appear unbreakable either: Wikipedia Link.
I mentioned HashBytes way back - now I'm just pointing out some of the reasons that I have yet to use it in a real production system.
Paul
Paul White
SQLPerformance.com
SQLkiwi blog
@SQL_Kiwi