EMERGENCY TDE PROBLEM

  • I was trying to turn off TDE on a SQL Server 2008 instance. I performed the following steps:

    USE MASTER

    GO

    ALTER DATABASE DBNAME

    SET ENCRYPTION OFF

    GO

    USE master

    DROP CERTIFICATE 'certname'

    DROP MASTER KEY

    I then bounced the instance. When it came up all of the previously encrypted databases are unavailable. I discovered that I FORGOT to run this statement for each database before dropping the certificate:

    USE DBNAME

    GO

    DROP DATABASE ENCRYPTION KEY

    GO

    What can I do????

    MM

  • I'm not familiar with TDE, but certificates are also used in Service Broker and my experience on this area has taught me to always keep a backup of all certificates (and passwords) in case of restore. If you have a backup of the certificate I guess you should get your data back if you restore it.

  • I found the backup of the key and cert for most all of the instances and they were fine after I re-created the cert and key from those backups. On two instances the cert and key were lost and those instances had their databases restored.

    There are some interesting quirks to TDE. If inspired I may try to write something about it here.

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