SQL Server 2008 has the encryption key management feature’s you’re looking for…

SQL Server 2008 Extensible Key Management enables the encryption keys that protect the database files to be stored in an off-box device such as a smartcard, USB device, or EKM/HSM module. This also enables data protection from database administrators (except members of the sysadmin group). Data can be encrypted by using encryption keys that only the database user has access to on the external EKM/HSM module.

Extensible Key Management also provides the following benefits:

* Additional authorization check (enabling separation of duties).
* Higher performance for hardware-based encryption/decryption.
* External encryption key generation.
* External encryption key storage (physical separation of data and keys).
* Encryption key retrieval.
* External encryption key retention (enables encryption key rotation).
* Easier encryption key recovery.
* Manageable encryption key distribution.
* Secure encryption key disposal..

See the full article Understanding Extensible Key Management for details.

The quick answer is that it’s been dropped. Microsoft posted the following in the 2008 Read me documentation:

5.1 SQL Server Notification Services Removed from SQL Server 2008

Notification Services is not a component of SQL Server 2008, but will continue to be supported as part of the SQL Server 2005 product support cycle. In future releases, support for key notification scenarios will be incorporated into Reporting Services.

Have you heard all the hype about SQL Server 2008 and want to check it out? Struggling to find the time in your busy day to get your hands on a CTP version and perform an install?

Here’s a nice link to a Microsoft site that let’s you get a hands view tutorial on SQL Server 2008 and has a few labs that gives you a closer look at some of their new features.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=
1032357623&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

It’s worth going through the registration rigmarole but make sure you do it with about an hour or so of your time spare, there’s a timer on it that runs out after 90 minutes.

Have fun and enjoy,
James.

If you’d like a quick rundown on what I think is most interesting in SQL Server 2008, check out my new white paper at:

http://info.quest.com/KKBlog_WorththeWait_WhitePaper_KKline

Enjoy!

-Kevin

It’s not an unfamiliar scenario - your production SQL Server is running on a 16-way box with oodles of memory but you’re still not getting the throughput you’re looking for. This tip is aimed at people who have already tried to tune their workload but are still seeing I/O bottlenecks and large lazy writer waits.

If your…

• T-SQL is optimized
• transaction-control is tuned not too commit too often, but just often enough and your
• database configurations are appropriate for the current hardware configuration (especially TempDB)
• disk I/O subsystem is not grossly undersized/slow

…but you’re still seeing I/O bottlenecks then you might want to evaluate SQL Server’s soft-NUMA support.

NUMA stands for Non-Uniform Memory Access and can refer to either Hardware NUMA or Software NUMA. Hardware NUMA tries to solve the problem of CPUs working faster than the memory available by creating affinity between a group of processors and memory; each group of processors is given a set of memory to access “locally” before reverting to “foreign” memory access - foreign being the memory in another group. Each group of processors in Hardware NUMA is referred to as a NUMA Node. Software NUMA is something that NUMA-aware software (like SQL Server 2005 and soon 2008) can leverage. With Software NUMA (soft-NUMA) CPUs are grouped into nodes (Hardware NUMA can further be segmented by using soft-NUMA, but I’m not going to get into that here) that, unlike Hardware NUMA, all share the same set of memory. NOTE: Soft-NUMA in SQL Server only enables the Scheduler and Network Interface (SNI) to leverage soft-NUMA. The benefit of using soft-NUMA with SQL Server is that there is a I/O thread and a lazy writer thread for each NUMA node. So, if you’re in the situation above and you have that 16-way server, using soft-NUMA to split it into four 4-processor NUMA nodes you can create four I/O threads and four lazy writer processes. If you’ve tuned the other aspects of your application, this could be a means of increasing the performance of your system.

For a more detailed look at NUMA in SQL Server 2005, read Scale up with SQL Server 2005 / SQL Server 2008 - NUMA, Configuring SQL Server 2005 for Soft NUMA, and NUMA Scenarios on MSDN.