How big is the database?

You could backup/restore every night. I know people that do that. However if you have lots of non-changing data, then it might be easier to do...

GSquared (2/22/2011)

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What I was asking was: Did Steve mean the question to be about legitimately protecting code, or did he mean to ask about people actually using completely ineffective means...

Not yet, I'll see if I can determine where this is on our list and when it might get changed.

It's not the restore method, it's the recovery model. Run this:

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX('db1', 'recovery')

If it's simple, then just

Backup database mydb to disk = 'c:\mybackup.bak' with INIT

Replace mydb with your database name,...

You might read this to better understand. I believe this is the stripe alignment of each particular drive as seen by Windows. So potentially the array is not aligned as...

On a similar debating note, does anyone know of code in SQL Server that's worth protecting with CLR, obfuscation, or any hassles of encrypting? Not data, but code?

I'm not saying you're wrong. But in two decades of working with all sorts of companies, almost nothing I've seen is worth protecting on the database side. Accounting software, imaging...

I would argue that the database access code, queries, reports, etc. aren't done with a lot of research and development. The techniques for querying data aren't that hard to learn,...

I've reworded the answers to eliminate confusion and awarded back points to everyone up to this time.

You can modify the WHERE clause to avoid those rows that have the item already. So something like this:

update MyTable

set MyChar = '1' + MyChar

WHERE SUBSTRING(...

This can be helpful (developer read in production), but it also produces another attack vector for security. Developers being able to pull that data out, means potential breaches, especially if...

There is an SDK for SQL Compare from Red Gate. The other tools might have one as well

http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-comparison-sdk/

Disclosure: I work for Red Gate.

In terms of LS/Repl/Mirror, the OP doesn't look...

Media/format is a big deal. I didn't cover it, but I've tried to set archive files as CSV so that they can easily be converted later.

Are there delimiters? Really you need to just find the logic that will allow you to find the fields. Are they are certain positions? Or do they come after a...

First I'm confused why you would want to use a cursor? SQL Server isn't very efficient with cursors and this seems like it could easily be a set based solution.

create...