A common question on the newsgroups is ''how do you encrypt data in a .NET [or other] client application and then decrypt it on SQL Server [or vice versa]?'' I actually ran down my list of answers to someone who asked this in the newsgroups a few weeks ago. I won’t get into the details, but the answers all pretty much say the same thing -- ...

SQL Server 2008 has an impressive array of encryption features -- cell-level symmetric and asymmetric encryption, key management, EKM, TDE, and more. But they do have some limitations. Symmetric encryption functions, for instance, can only encrypt slightly less than 8,000 bytes of data (the additional information like random IV and ...