If I use Transparent Data Encryption on my database, is there any impact on my db performance? Is it cause any problem for database indexing?
The process of encryption and decryption adds additional overhead to the database system. Even non-encrypted databases hosted on the same SQL Server instance would have some performance degradation because of tempdb encryption.
Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) protects your data at rest by performing real-time I/O encryption and decryption of SQL Server database data and log files. One of the biggest benefits of TDE is that the SQL Server engine handles all of the encryption and decryption work.
Transparent data encryption (TDE) encrypts SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Synapse Analytics data files. This encryption is known as encrypting data at rest. To help secure a database, you can take precautions like: Designing a secure system.
Some folks have tested this (see here, here, here and here) and have given some generic advice (see here and here). Seems the common perception is that the impact is about 3-5%. But 3-5% of what? If that is CPU and your workload is already CPU-bound, is that acceptable? Could it be worse? If that is I/O and you're already having I/O issues, is it going to kill your system? Who knows?
The best way you're going to determine what impact it will have on your performance is to test it in your environment. There are so many "it depends" factors here it's not funny. You should test your workload, against your database, on your hardware, over your network, with your usage patterns and backup procedures. You may have people coming back and saying "it hurt my performance a lot" or "I didn't even notice it" but how similar do you think their scenario is to yours?
Aron is absolutely right. What will be surely affected is size of all your backups. You have to think about backup compression as it doesn't exist when you use TDE. And it means all backups & log shipping will have much worse performance.
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