Margarity Kerns recently published a very nice article at SQL Server Central on using hash functions to detect changes in rows during the data warehouse load ETL process.  On the discussion page for the article I noticed a lot of the same old arguments against using hash functions to detect change.  After having this same discussion ...

Thanks to all those who made the NJSQL Saturday event held in Iselin, NJ today a success! Those lucky enough to attend were given a sneak preview of one of the best young presenters out there--MVP Jacob Sebastian--who will also be speaking at PASS.  I have to hand it to Jacob: he gave one of the best presentations on a SQL Server topic ...

In my last post I talked about how to work around a couple of the limitations of SQL Server encryption by using SQL CLR and the .NET Framework to encrypt a BLOB value (up to 2.1 GB in size), using any supported algorithm you choose. In the example I used AES to encrypt data using a passphrase. SQL Server 2008 also allows you to generate ...

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 ...