http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B5EB7D976-2922-4E99-9F6E-B1F323A884FA%7D&siteid=yhoo

http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm

http://www.usa.gov/veteransinfo/

Stealing passwords isn't the only avenue of attack for hackers.  Data can be retrieved from a stolen hard drive or lap-top with unencrypted data fairly easily.  I...

I think it should probably have been worded "Can you upgrade a read-only SQL Server 2000 database to SQL a Server 2005 database by restoring from a database backup?" or...

Tricky question - I got caught myself, assuming that counters set to zero are not "nothing".

If you haven't yet, download the C++ source code and use it as a guide for the conversion.  The code for the extended proc that creates the master key, and...

Yes, you should be able to decrypt and re-encrypt the master key with a new password without having to decrypt/re-encrypt everything else.  That's the advantage of layering the keys, ANSI...

I have a few ideas about what a mid-level should know:  RAID, index tuning, virtual servers, load balancing, proper database design techniques (normal forms anyone?), security configuration and administration, T-SQL DDL...

Makes you wonder - what are the "Day 1" skills a Junior DBA should have?  I would imagine it's difficult to walk into a company anywhere and try to get any level...

Note: this technique is officially "undocumented" and unsupported.  Don't use on production machines!

The advantage of using the user credentials is that you don't have to pass the plain text password "over-the-wire" to the server for every encryption/decryption.  There's really no performance benefit...

Hi Nick,

That's the method that has to be used.  I didn't create an automated method of decrypting/re-encrypting data (like in SQL 2005) for this version; particularly because I didn't want...

All other things being equal, Raid 5 read performance is not worse than Raid 1... unless one of the drives is bad, or if the RAID is in the process of rebuilding...

It's usually recommended that you avoid the 'sp_' prefix.  Like you stated, it will search master first, every time.

Assuming it finds a version of the SP in master, the version...

CASE is an expression, despite BOL calling it a function.  The difference between an expression and a function is much less significant than the difference between an expression (or a...

SELECT *

FROM MyTable

WHERE CASE WHEN mycompare1 IS NULL THEN 'A'

    ELSE mycompare1 END = 'A'

Which is defined by ANSI as the expanded form of the COALESCE function:

SELECT *

FROM MyTable

WHERE...

Case expression