Editorials

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Enriching Your Life

As I was looking to build career goals for the new year, I think mostly about technical topics. That makes sense, given my focus and job, but I ran across an interesting thread on Hacker News that asked about skills to work on in 2020, and not necessarily technical ones. I did find it interesting […]

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2020-05-26

107 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

The Build Book of News

Every year Microsoft has held the Build conference for developers. I've been lucky enough to go a few times, and I was hoping to get the chance to attend again. With the pandemic, the entire event went virtual, and was held across 48 continuous hours. I was slightly disappointed as a few sessions I wanted […]

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2020-05-23

110 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Bad Managers

I’m constantly hearing stories about terrible managers, and, of course, I’ve experienced quite a few myself. In fact, I can’t come up with many nice things to say about most managers when I look back over my career. (Luckily, my manager at Redgate is wonderful!) Early in my tech career, I was working at a […]

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2020-05-16

199 reads

Blogs

Microsoft announces new cybersecurity AI multi-model

By

Yesterday, July 27, 2026, Microsoft announced a new cybersecurity effort called Project Perception. Included...

Getting the SQL Server MCP Server Running

By

If you’ve wanted a SQL Server MCP server for your databases, it’s available. The...

Introducing azsql-migration-test: Test and Validate Azure SQL Database Migrations

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Introducing azsql-migration-test, a small open-source CLI that validates your Azure SQL Database migrations against...

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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

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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