Pro Encryption in SQL Server 2022: Provide the Highest Level of Protection for Your Data 1st ed. Edition

The mandate came down the first of the year - all of our corporate SQL Server databases must encrypt Personally Identifiable Information (PII). I've been working in the Microsoft stack for the past 20+ years as a software developer; I was one of the people at my company tapped to implement the mandate.Microsoft provides documentation online, but I've always found said documentation to be disjointed and written from the viewpoint of a software engineer (but not a technical writer) just trying to describe their one small section of a larger picture. There's no overarching flow to learning from such documentation.Going away from Microsoft and towards the user community isn't much better. IMO, there's a lot of hacks trying to pad their resumes by pushing out volumes of low quality documentation work on various discussion boards, web forums, and boutique web sites. Every time I tried to cut through the fog, I wound up either certain that I was missing something or totally confused.This book on data encryption for SQL Server 2022 was for me a well-focused spotlight, cutting through the previous jumbled web articles and forum posts. The book is extremely well written and organized by a professional writer who exhibits a full command of the subject. Some chapters give the overview of the various methodologies and provide a succinct description of the benefits and drawbacks of each. Other chapters can be followed verbatim for almost "cook-book" solutions to implementation and usage.I've used this book for the past week and I have solutions and recommendations ready for my decision-makers and stake-holders. I've been more productive with this book in one week than I had been in a month or more without it.UPDATE: In using this book to implement Extensible Key Management (EKM) via Microsoft Azure, I must report that Microsoft has changed changed its methodology and this book no longer conforms to current practices with Azure EKM. You can still use the information, but it's no longer a simple cook book solution for this particular feature.

Good work - makes a complex topic much more straightforward, but we are missing a discussion of TLS 1.3 supported by SQL Server 2022.

I work on the Azure SQL Database security team at Microsoft, and I have plenty of experience with the cryptographic controls in our database products. This book is well-written, accurate and complete. I am a stickler for getting wording correct when talking about cryptographic controls and this book nails it. Whether you have just a passing knowledge of SQL Server or are a veteran, you will learn a great deal from this book.Highly Recommended.