Temporarily Changing an Unknown Password of the sa Account
You are asked for the sa password for a SQL Server in order to perform a software upgrade. You, the DBA, don't know the password and it's not documented. Rodney Landrum provides a way out of this dilemma, demonstrating two techniques for temporarily changing the password, and then returning it to its previous unknown value.
Encryption: Not the End-All Fix for Data Privacy
Many state data-breach laws exempt encrypted data from PR-nightmare public-notice requirements, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's an easy answer to the data privacy challenge. Here's the lowdown on loopholes, caveats and options to consider when applying encryption.
SQL Agent - A Job Scheduler Framework
In this article, I'll show you how to create a generic scheduler that runs on a Windows Service. The scheduler will be able to accept pluggable actions that we can develop later implementing a custom interface.
Background
Finding Similar Data Using SQL Server Integration Services
SQL Server 2005 has greatly increased the capabilities of the platform and brought the capabilities for complex ETL packages to many businesses at an affordable cost. One of the very interesting transformations you can use in SSIS is the fuzzy grouping task and new author Brian Nordberg brings us a look at how you can use this.
DDL Replication in SQL Server 2000 and 2005
How schema changes can propogate in SQL Server 2005's Replication Architecture.
CLR: Digging into IDisposable
One of the major productivity benefits that the common language runtime (CLR) offers developers of managed code is that the garbage collector (GC) makes sure any memory allocated on the managed heap is cleaned up after it is no longer needed.
Scripting permissions using catalog views in SQL Server 2005
A nice How-To from one of the most respected SQL Server MVPs.
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Blogs
Microsoft announces new cybersecurity AI multi-model
By Brian Kelley
Yesterday, July 27, 2026, Microsoft announced a new cybersecurity effort called Project Perception. Included...
Getting the SQL Server MCP Server Running
By Steve Jones
If you’ve wanted a SQL Server MCP server for your databases, it’s available. The...
Introducing azsql-migration-test: Test and Validate Azure SQL Database Migrations
Introducing azsql-migration-test, a small open-source CLI that validates your Azure SQL Database migrations against...
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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'; GOSee possible answers