Introduction
Securing each part and data’s in a database is now an important task for DBA’s to accomplish else the data’s might be hacked. Keeping in mind Microsoft has started encryption features from SQL 2005 and it’s greatly improved it’s feature in SQL Server 2008. Lets recall the encryption features in previous versions of SQL Server.
- SQL Server 2000 – This version of SQL Server is not accompanied with any of the encryption facility. Hence the developers need to write their own code in their client applications to encrypt their data’s.
- SQL Server 2005 – Microsoft has introduced new encryption feature to encrypt column level (some times called as cell level) data’s. This method offers data’s to be encrypted in the database level however applications need to re-architecture to accompany this feature.
- SQL Server 2008 – Ok, In SQL Server 2005 we have encryptions to data’s. What happens if the database files itself is copied \ stolen, so that the data’s can be easily read loosing confidential data’s. To prevent this Microsoft has introduced a new encryption feature in SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition and this is “Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)”.