Excellent point. I had noticed that but for some reason never took it to the next level. It makes sense since every other database object can be [re]created in the...

All encryption is binary. It appears that particular encrypted data is encoded using BASE64 encoding which can be stored in a varchar() column.

I'm surprised you don;t have resources in your...

it will be very difficult to answer your question with anything other than generalities:

First you need to provide an overview of the system, what it does and the purpose and...

The ordering of the columns as they appear in a table definition script is cosmetic, they are organized internally in a way that is best for SQL.

I think DBA should have sysadmin rights on the SQL Servers at the very least. There are too many things you need to [re]configure on the server, like folders for...

As long as you are not using the assembly from any other .net application(s) on that server you do not need to worry about the dll file.

Sure Jeff, my name is Scott. I've been a participant here for a while so no need for obscurity anymore.

I have appreciated many of your excellent posts over that time...

Jeff Moden (4/7/2011)

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I couldn't have...

Jeff Moden (4/7/2011)

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There are times when such parallelism actually makes things slower. Seriously. The time to split the "stream" and reassemble it for final output can sometimes be...

Jeff Moden (4/1/2011)

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I've also seen folks that do it just the opposite. Encrypt the item you're trying to find and look that up in the encrypted column. Makes...

Slowness at application startup is caused by allocation and initialization of various resources. Some will be memory and process related, some network and some authentication, depending upon many factors and...

Henry_Lee (4/1/2011)

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However, on the other hand, according to BOL, the Database Master Key is stored in the database, so I wonder if the password can somehow be extracted from the...

Encryption is only as good as the key management mechanisms and how the other security on the server is implemented. They are all layers of protection and need to be...

Think in terms of granting execute permission to s stored procedure by some basic web user (app).

The user does not have access to certificates and keys directly, only granted...

after renaming the Windows box be sure to run:

sp_dropserver 'OLD_SERVER_NAME'

sp_addserver 'NEW_SERVER_NAME', 'local'

then stop and restart service.

When we upgrade a productions server we rename and change the IP addresses....