sql server - hash a SQL row?

Question

Is there a way to md5sum a row in a SQL table to check whether any column has been modified?

I would like to check whether any particular column has been changed versus an old copy of the data which i hold in a text file (which I will md5sum in C#).

EDIT: Just md5sum-ing each row

Answer 1

There are CHECKSUM(*), BINARY_CHECKSUM(*) and CHECKSUM_AGG. They do CRC32 like checkum, but for detecting changes to a row it should be more than enough (you are talking about 1 in 4 billion chances for a false negative collision).

Doing a cryptographic hash using HASHBYTES requires you to construct an expression representing the 'row'.