SQLServerCentral Editorial

Mining or Profiling

The more data you have, the better you should be able to predict something. Or at least that's one of the things that I learned while studying economics. If we could actually gather enough data about someone or some system, we could determine what the most likely outputs of the system will be. In the […]

SQLServerCentral Article

Output Parameters

Regular columnist Robert Marda writes about the basics of using output parameters. If you're not using output params we hope this article will get you started - they are a great way to return less data to the client, perfect if you need only a few values and not a recordset/resultset.

SQLServerCentral Editorial

What's Fair

If you read my recent editorial called Get Some Help, you realize that I didn't get any World Series tickets from the sale on the Colorado Rockie's web site. Not to berate the subject, but some friends and I had an interesting debate on how the situation was handled and what could be done differently.

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Mini-Me

Will the next version of Windows be a "Mini-Me" version of Vista? Who knows, and it's too early to tell, but apparently there's a mini-kernel version of Windows 7, the one after Vista, which fits into 25MB on disk. That's a touch lower than the 4GB that Vista takes up. Granted it's not a full […]

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Question of the Day

Symmetric Key Encryption

If I run this statement in SQL Server 2025, how is the password encrypted?

CREATE SYMMETRIC KEY MySymmetricKey
WITH ALGORITHM = AES_256,
KEY_SOURCE = 'My secret key source passphrase',
IDENTITY_VALUE = 'My secret identity value'
ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = 'S&perS#cretP@ssword7';
GO

See possible answers