1.  You're right, a regular password change policy would make it more difficult.  I think that's why they introduced the Service Master Key to encrypt the lower level keys (instead...

Hi Kristine,

Let me understand this - you're trying to decrypt a string that's not currently encrypted?  Is that correct?  You must be a QA person

As I mentioned above, I'm working on a newer encryption toolkit, and I'm almost to the point of beginning the testing process.  If anyone out there has the time, energy,...

This problem is caused by a couple of possible things:

1.  The DLL's for the XP's are not in the MSSQL/BINN directory.  Make sure you've copied them into that directory.

2.  The...

No problem   I'm working on a newer version now that operates similarly to the SQL 2005 T-SQL encryption commands with key management, custom...

Hi, the version is on the DLL's themselves.  Right click on one of the DLL's and the version should show up in the info. window.  The original DLL's didn't have...

LEN() strips trailing pad characters (normally spaces, but could vary depending on collation) and DATALENGTH() does not.

'' isn't the same thing as NULL.  To solve your problem, you might check...

Oops you're right, you said SQL was "just as powerful" without COUNT(*), not "more powerful".  Sorry about that.  Because COUNT(constant) doesn't have a guaranteed behavior, it's...

Hi Leon,

Thanks for pointing that out.  I actually included that in the clean-up of the most recent version, but sent the SSC guys an older version.  I've asked them to...

The point I'm making is that COUNT(1) is not defined as standard syntax, COUNT(*) is.  COUNT(1) [or COUNT(100), etc.] doesn't have a standard behavior defined, so that its behavior could...

Hi Steve and Yelena,

Thanks for the feedback!  I'll look into writing an article on JOINs in the future.  I'm actually working on a couple of other articles now, but I'll...

No problem It's been a while, but I think the discussion on the COUNT(*) vs. COUNT(1) was geared more towards performance. ...

When I have time to get the DP/API XP interfaces worked up, I'll ask the good folks here at SSC to post an article for general distribution.  Since it will...

Thanks for the link Max.  I don't like the fact that you can't declare a BOOLEAN variable and compare it against Boolean Literals (TRUE, FALSE, UNKNOWN), like in the following...

Yes, I should have added that the IF ... THEN ... ELSE method was not usable in a WHERE clause to my statement. I think the SQL99 standard looks...