One of the new features added to ColdFusion 9 is the Cache Template in Request setting located on the Server Settings > Caching page of the ColdFusion Administrator....
Adobe has posted a ColdFusion 9 Performance Brief, outlining several performance improvements over ColdFusion 7 and 8. The brief reports a 40% performance improvement over ColdFusion 8, and a 500% improvement over ColdFusion 7, running CanvasWiki....
As you are probably aware ColdFusion allows you to use the integrated J2EE sessions that are provided as part of the J2EE server (by enabling the Use J2EE session variables setting in ColdFusion Administrator)....
One of the best ways to really learn about something, is to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty. This is especially true for learning about security, it can be difficult to fully understand how attacks work by just reading about it....
Adobe just released a security bulletin APSB10-04 for ColdFusion 9. If you have the Solr Search Service running on a ColdFusion 9 server it binds the Solr Web Service to port 8983 on all IP addresses....
If you are having problems using FCKeditor on Firefox 3.6, it's due to a, lets call it a Year 2010 bug. You will see a textarea instead of the editor. This probably only exists in the ColdFusion version, I haven't checked the other versions......
If you use the cflogin tag to manage authentication you should consider setting loginstorage="session" in your Application.cfc or Application.cfm file for better security....
As you may know on SQL Server a varchar column can hold up to 8000 characters (each row can hold up to 8K, so it depends on the size of other columns), when you need to store more it is common to use the text or ntext datatypes....
I knew there are some issues with using onRequest in your Application.cfc and web services, but I didn't think there were any issues with onRequestStart and ColdFusion 8 SOAP web services....