Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 10: Views
318
In addition, remember that if you use an ALTER VIEW statement, you are entirely replacing the existing
view except for access rights. This means that the encryption is also replaced. If you want the altered
view to be encrypted, then you must use the WITH ENCRYPTION clause in the ALTER VIEW statement.
Let’s do an ALTER VIEW on our CustomerOrders_vw view that we created in AdventureWorks2008. If
you haven’t yet created the CustomerOrders_vw view, then just change the ALTER to CREATE:
ALTER VIEW CustomerOrders_vw
WITH ENCRYPTION
AS
SELECT sc.AccountNumber,
soh.SalesOrderID,
soh.OrderDate,
sod.ProductID,
pp.Name,
sod.OrderQty,
sod.UnitPrice,
sod.UnitPriceDiscount * sod.UnitPrice * sod.OrderQty AS TotalDiscount,
sod.LineTotal
FROM Sales.Customer AS sc
INNER JOIN Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh
ON sc.CustomerID = soh.CustomerID
INNER JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail AS sod
ON soh.SalesOrderID = sod.SalesOrderID
INNER JOIN Production.Product AS pp
ON sod.ProductID = pp.ProductID;
Now do an sp_helptext on your CustomerOrders_vw:
EXEC sp_helptext CustomerOrders_vw
SQL Server promptly tells us that it can’t do what we’re asking:
The text for object ‘CustomerOrders_vw’ is encrypted.
The heck you say, and promptly go to the sys.sql_modules metadata function:
SELECT *
FROM sys.sql_modules
WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID(‘dbo.CustomerOrders_vw’);
But that doesn’t get you very far either — SQL Server recognizes that the table was encrypted and will
give you a NULL result.
In short — your code is safe and sound. Even if you pull it up in other viewers (such as the Management
Studio, which actually won’t even give you the Modify option on an encrypted table), you’ll find it useless.
Make sure you store your source code somewhere before using the WITH ENCRYPTION
option. Once it’s been encrypted, there is no way to get it back. If you haven’t stored
your code away somewhere and you need to change it, then you may find yourself
re-writing it from scratch.