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WITH ENCRYPTION - bug or feature?

Hi,

Took a look at some existing DBs with SP3 in QA and was surprised to see that SPs stored with encryption appear in plaintext in the schema preview window...

EXEC [ctrl+space]

None of the other tools I have show me the plaintext for encrypted SPs so I wonder what's going on here!

First of all thanks! Interesting to see how some SPs work! - secondly, is this really a feature that should be out in the wild, I think hackers will adore you for this - perhaps I'm being nieve and it's actually easy to read Encrypted SP source text anyway...
DavidAtABC
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  • Bart Read
    Hi David,


    Thanks for your post. This will only work for SQL Server 2000 SPs: we can't read the text for encrypted SPs on SQL Server 2005, or rather we haven't found a way to do so yet -- it's actually quite likely not possible. However, displaying the plaintext definition of encrypted SQL Server 2000 objects is fairly well publicised on the net, so I don't think it's really a problem. This function is due to one of the libraries we use in SQL Prompt and SQL Compare that automatically decrypts encrypted objects.


    Cheers,
    Bart
    Bart Read
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  • DavidAtABC
    Thanks for that Bart.

    Does that mean I could do a SQL Compare against one DB with encrypted objects and another without now?

    It's a feature I wanted in SQL Compare a long time ago and was told it's not possible.

    Thanks,

    David.
    DavidAtABC
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  • Bart Read
    Interesting question. I imagine that might well work with SQL Server 2000 databases, but definitely won't work with SQL Server 2005 databases. I can't say my answer is definitive though so the only way to know is to give it a try and see what happens. I suspect it will probably never be possible for 2005, although it would be great if we could find a way to decrypt such objects.
    Cheers,
    Bart
    Bart Read
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