Difference between Cell- level Encryption and Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

Cell- level Encryption	Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)
Granular control over which data is encrypted	Encrypts the entire database
User‐aware encryption can control access on a need‐to‐know basis	Encryption is not user‐aware; data is open to all users who have permission to access the database
Requires analysis to find sensitive data	No analysis required because entire database is encrypted
Affect table structure because encrypted data can only be stored in varbinary data type columns.	No change is required in table structure.
Database applications need to be modified to use specific functions to encrypt and decrypt data.	No database application change needed.
Indexes, primary keys, and foreign keys cannot be encrypted.	No impact on indexing, primary keys, or foreign keys
Potential impact on performance because indexes on encrypted columns are not used while searching a value.	Small impact on performance (up to 5%)