TDE and Compression

[ShawnKPERS]

In SQL Server 2016 SP2 I am told compression for TDE encrypted databases is finally useable but there is at least one caveat that I know of and that is you need to set the MAXTRANSFERSIZE in SQL to something above 65536 bytes.

That is how would SQL deal with the backup. Does Veeam also have some built in way to deal with backing up TDE encrypted databases and compressing them? If they do is there anything special that needs to be in place like setting the backup to be "application aware" and provide the proper credentials for SQL?

Also would the compression of the TDE encrypted database in a Veeam backup be close to what it would be if it is not encrypted?

[Gostev]

Hello, Veeam does not have any special functionality for TDE encrypted databases. But since we use native SQL APIs for backup, it should just work. Thanks!

[Andreas Neufert]

We work on Image level, so we see the data in the encrypted format and by design of encryption a compression algorithm do not work as efficient as with unencrypted data.

[Gostev]

Andreas, I was thinking transaction logs backup and restore, thus my reference to SQL APIs.

[Andreas Neufert]

So the incermental forever image level backups contains the encrypted database files => Compression limited.
The transaction log backups contains unencryted data => compression normal as expected.