Articles

External Article

Defusing Database Time Bombs: Avoiding the Need to Refactor Databases

Where applications are evolved by gradually molding them to a growing understanding of the business domain, this presents great challenges to database development. If databases are designed too loosely, and initial errors are allowed to fester, the results become harder and harder to refactor until eventually they constitute a database time bomb. Thomas LeBlanc describes how to avoid a few basic, but very common, database time bombs.

2015-03-13

9,069 reads

External Article

IT Compliance and Software Development

What is IT Compliance and is it really necessary for contemporary Agile applications to be constrained by the requirements of compliance? William Brewer argues that if the objective is rapid delivery of applications, then compliance controls must be understood as early as possible in development.

2015-03-11

8,251 reads

External Article

Conrad Wolfram: Geek of the Week

Conrad Wolfram is the 'younger Wolfram' of Wolfram Research, the company behind Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica. He wants to transform the way in which we engage with mathematics. In particular, he would like to reform mathematics education to make greater use of information technology, and he is also leading the way with interactive publishing technology.

2015-03-09

7,173 reads

Technical Article

Getting Starting with Database Engine Tuning Advisor in SQL Server – Part 1

There are different techniques to optimize the performance of SQL Server queries but wouldn’t it be great if we had some recommendations before we started planning or optimizing queries so that we didn’t have to start from the scratch every time? This is where you can use the Database Engine Tuning Advisor utility to get recommendations based on your workload.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2015-03-05

7,574 reads

Blogs

Claude finds two cryptographic weaknesses (but the sky isn’t falling)

By

If you haven't seen the announcement, Anthropic was able to utilize Claude (Mythos Preview)...

Generate Embeddings in SQL with Aurora and Bedrock

By

Most embedding pipelines on AWS have the same shape: a job reads rows out...

Resolving SQL Server Transaction Log Issues Efficiently

By

Transaction log issues are one of the quietest ways a healthy database turns into...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Symmetric Key Encryption

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Symmetric Key Encryption

The “Successful Login” Dilemma: Why Your Login Auditing Strategy Might Be Hurting Your Server

By Pablo Echeverria

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The “Successful Login” Dilemma: Why...

Building Your Own Software

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building Your Own Software

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Symmetric Key Encryption

If I run this statement in SQL Server 2025, how is the password encrypted? 

CREATE SYMMETRIC KEY MySymmetricKey
WITH ALGORITHM = AES_256,
KEY_SOURCE = 'My secret key source passphrase',
IDENTITY_VALUE = 'My secret identity value'
ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = 'S&perS#cretP@ssword7';
GO

See possible answers