Hi!
What type of program do you need the passwords for (what kind of languege)? Maybe you should consider to build the encryption into your client, and save the password encrypted. If the user enters his password at the client, you only have to encrypt it and compare it with the saved value (both are encrypted then). This way the users real password never appears in your system. In addition you can try a one way encryption method, where the original password can't be retrieved from its encrypted counterpart, this provides additional security. If the code of your client is public, all of this is of course can't be used. In this case it might be a good idea to let every user have his own account on the SQL-serve (with proper restrictions of course).
Iker