Thanks, Michael. That script is the same one upon which I based my routine.

I ran it for a few weeks using 100MB chunks. And the very first...

Thanks for the replies. This was not meant to be a discussion of whether or not to shrink, or goodness of shrinking, just of how to best go about...

First url was supposed to be

Maybe you use ideas at or

doh! never mind, I did not think that last question through.

Marios, I like the way you think. This is going to take a little while to digest.

One question I have right away, though: was this the...

Prem, while I have not experienced any problems with restoring the service master key on a standby server, I don't know for certain that it does not affect linked servers...

Prem, you are fine. I've had to do the same thing more than once. But it is unnerving, and since then I have made it a point to synchronize...

I agree with all your statements. And for every post I've seen explaining how to do this in a manner that DBAs cannot decrypt, there is another post saying...

I don't think so. A sysadmin is always going to be able to grant herself rights required to open the key.

So I think you'd need to use...

Ditto the other comments. This is a superlative article. Thank you.

I could not agree more with Brad's comments above. Well done.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic203537-5-1.aspx#bm204211

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqldataaccess/thread/535614e6-b553-4342-8980-b1a1d9a8b305/

Sorry I could not figure out how to post a working hyperlink, may be my IE security.

I've no direct experience with this, but have you tried setting XACT_ABORT...

Good stuff. I like the idea of just altering the DMK rather than synching the SMK, did not know there was an alternative. You've taken this a good...

I like your no-decrypt solution, wish I thought of that.

Man, I don't recall specifying the expiry date, or the 1yr default lifetime. It seems embarrassingly clear in the BOL....