The passphrase approach is simple enough for the SQL stmts, and it might even peform better (I haven't measured, but for sure you don't have the overhead of opening a key). ...

Not sure where else to document this, this clearly not best place.  We've done some perf testing since this article was written, and have discovered there's a decent performance hit...

Geno, thanks for your kind words.  To your point, it might be nice if it worked that way, but in fact SQL does not encrypt same sequence of characters to...

Forgot to include this:  in addition to the UDFs, we've also decided to use a stored proc to wrap/hide the open symmetric key business. 

create proc dbo.spOpenSymmKey

as

--open symm key if not already...

I'm really glad to see this is being received well.  The code snippets got reformatted a little, so I apologize if hard to read;  this is my first article &...

Just backup the service master key from one SQL Server and then restore it on all the other ones.  Ideally I think the restore master key step would be part...

Thanks, Dan!  That's kind of thing I was hoping to hear.  I'm sorry to hear about the perfmon, but I don't think that's enough to force us to rebuild this box.

Resolved:  needed to run sp_refreshsubscriptions after sp_addarticle, and before running snapshot agent. 

Seems to me this info was much harder to come across than it should have been.

We're doing this.  Using transactional repl, pull subscription, distributor on the publisher.  I think we were driven to this model by the various constraints of 2000->2005 repl, but it's a...

Contrary to several above posts, both solutions in original post rely on ordering of the input data. 

Given that, I think the Solution 1 is better just because it's simpler,...

I agree w/Mr Hicklin, 75% performance improvement is highly dubious. 

I would understand it if performance was perhaps 75% WORSE, though.  When inserting data into a table variable, SQL will...

My favorite way is SC command, works on local or remote box, very fast.  This tool should totally replace old NETSVC in anyone's toolkit, much more powerful and much faster.

I wound up exporting registry sections to text files.  This was not that elegant but allowed a) ready comparison of settings between 2 servers, and b) ability to script/automate server...

I have lot of procs that take 10-100x longer to compile than to actually run, so WITH RECOMPILE not always acceptable option. 

Last year after getting frustrated by a few similar...

Amen, DP.  Sorry I missed the original printing.  I think this is still a great article, glad to see there are people like you willing to publish potentially unpopular view like...