Some followup resources for those attending this week’s course 2780: Maintaining a SQL Server 2005 Database:

Security Topics

• Encrypting Connections to SQL Server: start with this article from Books Online
• Encrypting data at rest: I have previously blogged about this on this site.
• Encryption demo: Here’s the script I ran in my demo to encrypt the “National ID number” from the Adventureworks Employee table. File Attachment: encryption_demo.zip (1017 bytes)
• Security Best Practices: a white paper from Microsoft (direct link to Word doc. download).

Design and Performance Topics

• Disk I/O and performance: Start with this white paper from Microsoft (direct link to Word doc. download)

Monitoring

• Creating server-side traces: Please see my earlier blog posts on this topic.
• Event Notifications: For a better understanding of the underpinnings, see The Rational Guide To SQL Server 2005 Service Broker.