Performance impact of TDE

1

Hi all,

Does anyone have any benchmarks to quantify the performance (CPU primarily) impact of having TDE enabled? I found this article...

But it is from 2012 and I'm using SQL Server 2017 which, I presume has improved since then. I have found articles saying that the performance impact is "minimal" but I'm calculating the cost of moving from Standard Edition to Enterprise (with it enabled) and need to account for the performance hit of TDE.

Thanks!

2

We have one TDE db. The performance hit is not really from one user db (unless you just read/write the bejeebers out of it).

Rather, it's from the fact that enabling TDE on any user db means that SQL then automatically encrypts ("TDE's") tempdb as well. Presumably that effects only temp tables actually paged to disk, since TDE is at-rest-only encryption, but we have some very large data sets in tempdb, so I see the effect of it.