Symmetric Key Creation Question I am going through the CREATE SYMMETRIC KEY (Transact-SQL) page.

In there it says as a Caution


  When a symmetric key is encrypted with a password instead of the
  public key of the database master key, the TRIPLE DES encryption
  algorithm is used. Because of this, keys that are created with a
  strong encryption algorithm, such as AES, are themselves secured by a
  weaker algorithm.


I do not understand the first part in bold and have a couple of questions.


From my testing I do not see an option to encrypt a symmetric key
with Database Master key.  
Isn't the Database master key a Symmetric key.  What do they mean by
    public key of th database master key?
I believe you are correct and the docs need updating.  Should probably read:


  When a symmetric key is encrypted with a password instead of a
  certificate (or another key), the TRIPLE DES encryption algorithm is
  used to encrypt the password. Because of this, keys that are created
  with a strong encryption algorithm, such as AES, are themselves
  secured by a weaker algorithm.


docs.microsoft.com is all on GitHub, so you can propose doc changes.

I've submitted a pull request to update the language.  You can follow it here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/sql-docs/pull/310