Additional Articles


Technical Article

Introducing SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 Integration Services

The latest release of SSIS strengthens its position as one of the primary foundations of Business Intelligence, delivering a powerful framework for solutions that combine data from disparate sources, facilitating its analysis and reporting. Join Marcin Policht as he reviews its general characteristics.

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2010-02-09

3,387 reads

External Article

Don Syme: Geek of the Week

It came as a surprise to many of us when Microsoft pulled from it's hat a rabbit in the form of an exciting, radical, language that offers an effective alternative to the Object-oriented orthodoxy. The creative force behind this language, F#, turns out to be a brilliant Cambridge-based Australian called Don Syme, already well known for his work on generics in .NET. F# has taken the specialised power of ML and OCaml and developed a versatile general-purpose .NET language. We sent Richard Morris across the road to investigate.

2010-02-05

2,621 reads

External Article

Laying out SQL Code

It is important to ensure that SQL code is laid out the best way for the team that has to use and maintain it. Before you work out how to enforce a standard, one has to work out what that standard should be for the application. So do you dive into detail or create an overall logic to the way it is done?

2010-02-05

4,843 reads

External Article

How to use sys.fn_PhysLocFormatter undocumented function

It would be nice if we could use the DBCC PAGE command to see exactly what it is stored at the page level, however, in order to do this we need to find a way to correlate the results returned from a SELECT statement with the physical data location. Is that possible? The answer is: YES. All we need to do is use the sys.fn_physLocFormatter function. In this tip, I will cover how to use this undocumented function.

2010-02-02

2,681 reads

External Article

Managing Data Growth in SQL Server

'Help, my database ate my disk drives!'. Many DBAs spend most of their time dealing with variations of the problem of database processes consuming too much disk space. This happens because of errors such as incorrect configurations for recovery models, data growth for large objects and queries that overtax TempDB resources. Rodney describes, with some feeling, the errors that can lead to this sort of crisis for the working DBA, and their solution.

2010-02-01

3,624 reads

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Symmetric Key Encryption

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

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Building Your Own Software

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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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