How Secure is TDE?
When we consider how secure a form of encryption is there are two things we want to consider. Let’s discuss each of these in turn. What are We Protected...
2023-01-13 (first published: 2023-01-03)
402 reads
Matthew McGiffen DBA
Understanding Keys and Certificates with TDE
When you first look at the encryption hierarchy for TDE in SQL Server it can be a bit daunting. There seem to be a lot of objects involved and...
2023-01-04 (first published: 2022-12-21)
344 reads
What is TDE (Transparent Data Encryption)?
TDE is referred to as a “transparent” form of encryption. What that means is that the process of encrypting and decrypting data is fully performed in the background. The...
2022-12-19
115 reads
Recommended Approach to Encryption in SQL Server
We looked earlier at the various places our data lives – on disk, in memory, in-transit across the network. A good strategy will protect all of these locations –...
2022-12-28 (first published: 2022-12-14)
558 reads
Overview of SQL Server Encryption Features
SQL Server has had the native ability to encrypt data since SQL Server 2005. This included functionality that could be used to encrypt individual items and columns of data...
2022-12-12
151 reads
Encryption and Data Protection Regulation
One of the reasons you may be considering encryption is due to the relevant data protection regulation: either because the regulation specifies that data should be encrypted or because...
2022-12-07
27 reads
What do we want to achieve by encrypting our data?
On the face of it, this is a very obvious question with a very obvious answer. We want to prevent data from falling into the wrong hands. In practice,...
2022-12-05
24 reads
Query Store Hints in SQL Server 2022
Another neat little feature in SQL Server 2022 is Query Store Hints. This is the ability to apply a query hint through Query Store rather than having to modify...
2022-11-30
80 reads
Encrypting Your SQL Data Should be Your Default Option
Cyber-attacks and data breaches seem to be perpetually on the rise. Every week we hear news of large companies that have had data stolen with both financial and reputational...
2022-12-14 (first published: 2022-11-30)
390 reads
My SQL Server Encryption book has just been published!
It’s been a long journey, but I got the email from Apress yesterday to say that my book “Pro Encryption is SQL Server 2022” has now been published. You...
2022-12-05 (first published: 2022-11-23)
245 reads
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
Forums
Server-Level Table sizes
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Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers