SQL Server Magazine

A vast number of encoding and encryption methods are available for obfuscating and protecting data, respectively. Common examples include the turbo or convolution codes that are often used to encode digital communication signals, or RSA, Blowfish, and other hashing techniques. The complexity of various decoding and decryption algorithms is often measured by the amount of memory required to crack the stream of raw data (sometimes referred to as buffer size). With SQL Server, trial-and-error experiments have shown that WITH ENCRYPTION encodes (but doesn't actually encrypt) the text of database objects. Moreover, the buffer size equals the length of one unicode character (i.e., 2 bytes). In other words, decoding objects that were created WITH ENCRYPTION can be relatively straightforward.

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