Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

Manvendra Singh
sysprocesses details for BACKUP DATABASE statement after encryption

Performance impact analysis of enabling Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) on SQL Server

October 14, 2021 by

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) encrypts database files to secure your data. It also encrypts the tempdb database to secure your data in a temporary space. The process of encryption and decryption adds additional overhead to the database system. Even non-encrypted databases hosted on the same SQL Server instance would have some performance degradation because of tempdb encryption. Today I will show you performance impact analysis using few simple T-SQL statements by comparing their stats gathered before and after enabling TDE.

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Manvendra Singh
Check encryption state after TDE SCAN

Understanding the TDE SCAN process in Transparent Data Encryption

September 30, 2021 by

Transparent Data Encryption is a SQL Server feature that is used to protect data stored in SQL Server databases. The process to enable TDE on any user database is a straightforward method. Once we enable TDE on any user database, SQL Server performs a scan for each data page into the buffer pool and then writes the encrypted pages back to disk. The process of scanning each data page is known as TDE scan. Any database is fully encrypted once the TDE scan will be completed for all data pages of the database.

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Manvendra Singh
Check Transparent Data Encryption state after removing TDE

Remove Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) from SQL Server user databases

September 24, 2021 by

Transparent Data Encryption is getting popular these days because every business owner is serious about protecting their data. Everybody wants to use the latest encryption technologies to make sure their systems are more secure and stable. SQL Server also offers some encryption features to protect client’s data like TDE (Transparent Data Encryption), Always Encrypt, etc. Sometimes, business wants to transform their existing encryption solution by implementing its advance versions or encryptions. You must remove the existing encryption solution before implementing any newer solution.

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Manvendra Singh
Check transparent data encryption state of tempdb and user database after enabling it

Impact of TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) on Tempdb databases

September 15, 2021 by

This article will explain the impact of TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) on one of the crucial system databases, tempdb. Everybody wants to secure their data to prevent unauthorized access and use. SQL Server is a very popular enterprise RDBMS system that is used to store client’s data inside their databases. It also offers multiple features to secure the data stored in the databases. TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) is one of those features which is used to secure SQL Server databases by encrypting their database files. TDE protects data by applying encryption using a certificate which is also protected by the master key.

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Manvendra Singh
Check Instant File Initialization using error log file

Understanding Instant File Initialization after enabling TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) on SQL Server databases

August 19, 2021 by

SQL Server Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enables encryption on database files to secure its databases. Enabling TDE might have some adverse effects on your database system or on some database features. We must understand our database environment and plan accordingly before opting and deploying any new feature to production systems.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to Configure TDE database with AlwaysOn using the Azure Key Vault in SQL 2016

July 28, 2017 by

One of the recent tasks I undertook on configuring Transparent Data encryption (TDE) using asymmetric key protection with Azure Key Vault with Always On opened a different dimension on securing data for me. Even though it seems slightly complex, if you have the key details, the steps are in fact, really straight forward.

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Ahmad Yaseen

How to add a TDE encrypted user database to an Always On Availability Group

April 27, 2017 by

SQL Server Transparent Data Encryption, also known as TDE, is a “data at rest” encryption mechanism that is introduced in SQL Server 2008 as an Enterprise Edition feature. TDE is used to perform a real-time I/O encryption for the SQL Server database data, log, backup and snapshot physical files, rather than encrypting the data itself, using either Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) or Triple DES (3DES) encryption.

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Aamir Syed

How to configure Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) in SQL Server

December 19, 2016 by

Introduction and Overview

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) was introduced in SQL Server 2008. Its main purpose was to protect data by encrypting the physical files, both the data (mdf) and log (ldf) files (as opposed to the actual data stored within the database). Transparent Data Encryption Encrypts SQL Server, Azure SQL Databases, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse data files.

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Ahmad Yaseen

How to configure SQL Server mirroring on a TDE encrypted database

February 19, 2016 by

Securing and encrypting sensitive data stored in your production databases is a big concern, especially the databases storing the organization’s financial data and customers’ confidential information.

SQL Server offers multiple encryption methods in the cell, table and database levels. And in this article, we are interested in a SQL Server database encryption method, introduced in SQL Server 2008, called Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). SQL Server TDE provides encryption on the database file level; it encrypts the database (.MDF), (.LDF), (.NDF), (.BAK), (.DIF), (.TRN) and snapshot files.

The main purpose of this article is showing how we could setup a mirroring site for a database encrypted using SQL Server Transparent Data Encryption. But before starting the demonstration, it is better to introduce TDE first.

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