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Measuring the Performance Impact of TDE

Manvendra Singh does the math:

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) encrypts database files to secure your data. It also encrypts the tempdb database to secure your data in a temporary space. 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. Today I will show you performance impact analysis using few simple T-SQL statements by comparing their stats gathered before and after enabling TDE.

I will execute T-SQL statements (INSERT, UPDATE, SELECT, BACKUP DATABASE) before and after enabling encryption (Transparent Data Encryption) and gather their performance statistics during each execution. Finally, once we will have performance stats taken before and after enabling encryption then we will compare them to understand the performance impact analysis. I have used DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS before executing each query to clean the buffer cache.

Click through for the results. My rule of thumb is about a 5% performance overhead, but Manvendra shows us some of the particulars of what that means.