Blog

  • Crystal Balls

    In the centenary edition of the monthly blogging party that is T-SQL Tuesday, Adam Machanic asks us to look forward 100 months and speculate what the world of SQL Server will look like: http://dataeducation.com/invitation-t-sql-tuesday-100-looking-forward-100-months/ For Adam’s challenge, we’re looking forward just over 8 years. If we look back that amount then we’re looking at SQL Read more

  • Recovering a TDE protected database without the Certificate

    If you’ve been careful and done everything right when you’re setting up TDE then you shouldn’t run into this problem. We all make mistakes though, and we’ve all been asked to deal with environments that haven’t been so carefully managed. But what if you do? You have access to the backups for one or more Read more

  • TDE and backup compression – still not working?

    Until SQL 2016 if you used TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) you couldn’t use backup compression. In 2016 Microsoft changed this, but it has been a rocky road. Backups work okay but in some circumstances people have found that they are corrupt when they come to restore them. We thought that was all fixed, as highlighted Read more

  • Migrating or Recovering a TDE protected Database

    When encrypting a database with Transparent Data Encryption(TDE), a vital consideration is to make sure we are prepared for the scenario when something goes wrong. For instance, if the server hosting our SQL instance goes belly-up, can we recover the data that we have encrypted with TDE? In the ordinary recovery scenario, we would make Read more

  • Encrypting an existing database with TDE

    As mentioned previously, the process of setting up TDE (Setting up Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)) is the same whether you’ve just set up a new database, or whether you’re working with a live database. Once you turn encryption on SQL Server will begin the process of encrypting any data in your database. Be that 1 Read more

  • Setting up Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

    You can set up Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) when you first create a database, or you can apply it to an existing database. In the latter case, once TDE has been enabled it will set to work encrypting your existing data in the background. In either case the steps are the same. We’ll run through Read more