I have used quest in the past. fairly good product IMO. have not used idea's product.

try running dbcc memorystatus to see how much is actually consumed

I have been using vista for several months now on a new laptop I bought. The performance hasn't been great. file operations take much longer than on older, slower machines...

you can also use dbcc memorystatus to see how much memory is being consumed by SQL

yeah, that should work. I was hoping to get one in the past, but it may not be possible.

if you are trying to search sprocs for a word, check out SQLDigger. It's free and does a good job (sometimes searching the table doesn't work as a sproc could...

Thanks for all the feedback so far. There have been some great suggestions, as well as some humorous ones. I appreciate all of them.

I assume the column has a non clustered index defined?

If you want to hide the text from anyone who has access to view the object definition, that is when you will want to use encryption.

I see this mostly used in "packaged" applications that have a SQL backend. It's so you can't use the logic in their sprocs. I have rarely seen this used in...

I have done this before, we migrated to VB.net/SQL2005 from access. We had to basically start by porting all the data into sql, then we recreated all the form functionality...

not a bad idea, this will preserve the old key incase a mistake is made. you would then be able to fix any errors in your process.

thanks for the folloup - good info. kind of surprising you cannot do that.

no, they did not resolve the issue you are describing in your last post. they will not work for key values that are already being used in both databases for...

I can confirm that we have mirrored from a 64 bit to a 32 bit platform, although the 64 bit machine was running 32 bit SQL server. I wouldn't think...