Microsoft SQL Server 2005 introduces a new feature set, known internally as 'Secret Storage'. Secret Storage is the overall umbrella technology for the data encryption facilities in the SQL Server database engine, including the key management story. The...

In an earlier post , I said it will be possible to change the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 service account passwords without requiring a service restart. Today we found a corner case. It turns out, when you install SQL Server 2005 32 bit editions on an x64...

In the SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, available for free here , there is new connection string option: 'user instance=true'. When this connection string option is specified, the SQL Express instance you are connecting to (we call this the parent instance...

A couple of weeks ago, we checked-in a feature to Microsoft SQL Server 2005, that allows the various Service Account passwords to be changed, using the SQL Server Configuration Manager, without having to restart the respective services. NOTE: It is...