Keep good (and secure records) of the certificate and password. Once Transparent Data Encryption is enabled on the database you won’t be able to restore or move it another server unless this same certificate has been installed. Not only for environmental refreshes but disaster recovery purposes. Keep in mind that you must create a backup of this certificate. The database master key creates a certificate in the master database. The Service Master Key encrypts the database Master Key for the master database. The Server Master Key is created at the time of the initial SQL Server instance setup. SQL Server 2008 Evaluation, Developer, Enterpriseįirst we have the Windows Operating System Level Data Protection API, which decrypts the Service Master Key found in the SQL Server instance level.SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, Evaluation, Developer, Enterprise, Datacenter.SQL Server 2012 Evaluation, Developer, Enterprise.SQL 2014 Evaluation, Developer, Enterprise.SQL 2016 Evaluation, Developer, Enterprise.Transparent Data Encryption Eligible SQL Server Editions:. What good is an encrypted database if the data placed in TempDB isn’t encrypted? You shouldn’t notice much of a difference in how Transparent Data Encryption operates, but this is good to know and often overlooked. Since the tempdb is used by all user databases (processing/storing temporary objects). In the event that a backup of the database gets lost or stolen, the culprit will not be able to restore the database without the appropriate certificate, keys and passwords.Īlso, the TempDB database will be automatically encrypted. It does this by using either Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), or Triple DES, encrypting the file pages and then decrypted as the information goes into memory.Īlso note, that as a result of Transparent Data Encryption, database backups will also be encrypted. This technology was designed to have the entire encryption process be completely transparent to the applications accessing the database. Transparent Data Encryption Encrypts SQL Server, Azure SQL Databases, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse data files. Its main purpose was to protect data by encrypting the physical files, both the data (mdf) and log (ldf) files. Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) was introduced in SQL Server 2008.

Sql server backup service master key