Blog

  • Setting Up Always Encrypted

    Setting Up Always Encrypted

    In this post we’re going to go through the steps to set up Always Encrypted and create an encrypted column. As with my last post we’re looking at the flavour of Always Encrypted without enclaves, we’ll look at working with enclaves in detail later on. Read more

  • What is Always Encrypted and how does it work?

    What is Always Encrypted and how does it work?

    Always Encrypted was a new encryption feature added to SQL Server with the 2016 version of the product. Initially it was just available in enterprise edition, but from SQL Server 2016, SP1 was made available in standard edition also. Unlike TDE which encrypts the whole database, Always Encrypted is a form of column encryption that… Read more

  • Introduction to SQL Server Query Store

    Introduction to SQL Server Query Store

    Introduced with SQL 2016, Query Store was, probably without doubt, the most anticipated and talked out new feature. In this post we’ll just take a brief look at it, what it is, how you set it running, and what you can use it for. This will be a fairly brief overview – you’d need a… Read more

  • SQL Server Backup Encryption and Compression

    SQL Server Backup Encryption and Compression

    In SQL Server you can also compress your encrypted backups. Unlike TDE this has been possible with Backup Encryption since the feature was first made available, and there have been no issues that have required fixing – though as always you should still test that restores work correctly. As mentioned in my post about compression… Read more

  • Statistics Parser

    Statistics Parser

    Using Statistics Parser to easily read output from STATISTICS IO and STATISTICS TIME. Read more

  • Backup Encryption Performance

    Backup Encryption Performance

    Unlike TDE, there is some extra CPU overhead when you take an encrypted backup as the data has to be encrypted before being written to disk – whereas with TDE the data is already encrypted. Backup times however are unlikely to be affected significantly as the bottleneck is usually going to be the time it… Read more