Why TDE SQL Server Restores Fail on Amazon RDS
Who this is for: anyone migrating an on-premises SQL Server database that has Transparent Data Encryption turned on to RDS for SQL Server, and wants to understand why the restore fails before hitting it in a maintenance window.
A colleague on our infrastructure team spent a Saturday morning migrating a finance database to RDS using the native backup and restore path we'd used successfully a dozen times before. This one had Transparent Data Encryption turned on, something a compliance requirement had added eight months earlier and that nobody flagged as relevant to the migration checklist. The restore failed within seconds with a certificate error, and what should have been a two-hour cutover turned into a multi-day detour figuring out that RDS handles TDE certificates through its own dedicated stored procedures, not the CREATE CERTIFICATE and BACKUP CERTIFICATE commands you'd use on-prem. I'm writing this up so the next person doesn't...
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