November 1, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Is it possible to copy/export an encrypted stored procedure from one db to another?
My goal is to copy encrypted stored procedures out of a live db and place them into a db where I can then decrypt them and peek inside. On some recommendation our software vendor got, they decrypted them all to gain performance. As a beginning report writer, I can't see which tables they are working with whenever they use stored procedures for their "canned" reports. It would be cool to know this information for other report requests I get.
November 1, 2007 at 5:06 pm
There are third party tools you can get that will decrypt stored procs (at least up through SQL Server 2000). If you Google or Yahoo 'decrypt stored procedure' you'll get some freeware and some not-so-freeware suggestions. I tried the free stuff and found it lacking in some ways so we ended up buying DecryptSQL. Worked fine for what we needed and simple to use. (And no, I don't work for them).
I'd make sure you're not violating some part of your contractual agreement with the vendor before you do this, though.
November 1, 2007 at 5:38 pm
I will check with the vendor and the agreement. I just figured if I didn't "break" the db in the process I was good. Before the last upgrade, none of the sp's were encrypted....at least none of the ones I wanted to look at.
I've used google to search for decrypting capabilities and I found the one you mentioned. I searched for....
copying exporting stored procedures
....and I'm finding information on how to copy/export/import but I don't think anything mentioned will work on encrypted sp's.
Does the software package you mentioned copy or export encrypted SP's from one db to another? If not, what would I use to do that? I don't want to do any decrypting until an sp is moved. I'll check with the software vendor about the contract before copying anything though.
TIA,
John
November 1, 2007 at 5:45 pm
If I'm remembering correctly, the tool we use grabs the proc and brings it up into a window in clear text. From there you can save it to another server or write it to a file to post later. At least that's how I remember it. We just needed to see what one particular proc was doing and so we didn't decrypt anything except the one we cared about. It didn't take long to see where the problem was once we could actually see the text. I know that there may be substantial intellectual capital locked up in these vendor-supplied procs, but the hassle we have when we have performance problems has convinced me we don't want to buy any more systems with database objects we can't see.
Just my opinion. Your milage may vary.
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