Blockchain in your database

It's okay, this isn't linked to the coming Cryptopocalipse

Microsoft SQL Server 2022 - Ledger Tables - Why?

Yes, blockchain has (and has been for some time actually) materialised into your SQL database! well, not “your” database, but if you are running SQL/Azure 2022 databases, you can leverage the blockchain capabilities known as ledger tables.

The ledger feature provides tamper-evidence capabilities in your database. You can cryptographically attest to other parties, such as auditors or other business parties, that your data hasn’t been tampered with. Ledger helps protect data from any attacker or high-privileged user, including database administrators (DBAs), system administrators, and cloud administrators. As with a traditional ledger, the feature preserves historical data. If a row is updated in the database, its previous value is maintained and protected in a history table. Ledger provides a chronicle of all changes made to the database over time.

Ledger and the historical data are managed transparently, offering protection without any application changes. The feature maintains historical data in a relational form to support SQL queries for auditing, forensics, and other purposes. It provides guarantees of cryptographic data integrity while maintaining the power, flexibility, and performance of the SQL database.

This also provides the cryptographic proof of data integrity to auditors. This proof can help streamline the auditing process. It also provides nonrepudiation regarding the integrity of the system’s data.

Companies have a solution for multiple-party networks where trust is low between parties that participate on the network. Participants can verify the integrity of the centrally housed data, without the complexity and performance implications that network consensus introduces in a blockchain network.

Updatable ledger tables track the history of changes to any rows in your database when transactions that perform updates or deletions occur. An updatable ledger table is a system-versioned table that contains a reference to another table with a mirrored schema.

Append-only ledger tables block updates and deletions at the API level. This blocking provides more tampering protection from privileged users such as system administrators and DBAs.

So, in closing, why would you need this? Not for Crypto mining for sure!