KEYS

In the Ultra Transcenders books

DBX-DEP

Each book explains KEYS in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• AUTO CDC

  The Lakeflow pipelines API for change data capture: it merges incoming changes into a streaming table, keeping either just the latest values (SCD 1) or full history (SCD 2), and uses an ordering column to cope with records that arrive late. A snapshot variant also exists.

Related terms

• Access keys

  Pair of 512-bit keys belonging to a storage account; every account SAS and service SAS is signed with one of them. Once both are regenerated, direct key access and all those SAS tokens stop working.

• AES

  A symmetric block cipher. Software-only encryption of stored data in AOS uses the 256-bit form, while SSH with keys can use the CTR modes at 128, 192 or 256 bits.

• Allow storage account key access

  Storage setting which, once disabled, makes every request authorised by Shared Key fail with 403, covering account keys plus account and service SAS. Microsoft Entra identities gain nothing from it, and user delegation SAS keeps working.

• Always Encrypted

  Client-side encryption of SQL columns using keys never revealed to the database engine, meaning cloud administrators and DBAs only ever see ciphertext.

• AUTO LIQUID

  The predictive optimization operation that picks liquid clustering keys automatically. When it skips a table, the History tab shows a Not applied row with the reason.

• Automatic liquid clustering

  Enabled by CLUSTER BY AUTO for managed tables in Unity Catalog. It relies on predictive optimization to study how a table is queried, select clustering keys and swap them once the expected benefit is greater than the expense.

• Azure AI Search admin key

  Either of a search service's two admin API keys (primary and secondary), each granting full read and write access and each regenerable. Rotation without downtime: point clients at the secondary, regenerate the primary, then do the reverse.

• Azure AI Search query key

  Read-only API key used only to query the documents collection of an index; a service can hold up to 50. Every query key works across all indexes, and query keys are created or deleted rather than regenerated.