Most experienced DBAs know that sysdepends is not very reliable, so how can you find the dependencies inside your database? New author Christian Buettner brings us his technique for finding those hidden dependencies based on your query plans.
This article shows how to retrieve both remote and local XML data and display it in a data Web control.
Simon Sabin is always cagey about giving advice on the sort of hardware to run SQL Server on, but admits to some general rules.
How many times have you wished that there was a parameter for DATEPART to allow you to check for workdays? While many of us may get stuck working 6 or 7 days a week, most of the world revolves on a 5 day work week. Monday through Friday. New author Jeff Moden brings us a method of easily calculating the number of workdays between any two dates.
When IT starts to stand for 'Implement This', even the keenest DBA begins to dream of farming Alpacas as a career-change...and we ask our readers how they would have solved the DBA's dilemma.
There are some issues associated with managing identity columns with replication in your SQL Server database. As with previous releases of software, SQL Server 2005 requires that database administrators use special care when replicating tables with identity columns.
While SQL Server's Profiler is a great tool, it can be hard to work with and we can easily miss information in the results. New author Solomon Rutzky brings us a short article that can help you to better configure your traces to get the information you need.
A primary objective of any analytic architecture is business enablement - the ability to provide business users with access to quality information that can be used to drive decision-making.
This article series features a demo app affectionately named Something Not Entirely Unlike Access, which employs a variety of methods to obfuscate the "Accessian" features.
The sixth installment of the XML Workshop for SQL Server shows how the XML Schemas fit into the XML subsystem. Regular author Jacob Sebastian brings structure to your XML documents with a few schema examples.
By Brian Kelley
Yesterday, July 27, 2026, Microsoft announced a new cybersecurity effort called Project Perception. Included...
By Steve Jones
If you’ve wanted a SQL Server MCP server for your databases, it’s available. The...
Introducing azsql-migration-test, a small open-source CLI that validates your Azure SQL Database migrations against...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Symmetric Key Encryption
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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'; GOSee possible answers