Overview
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduced a feature called data classification, which allows you to mark certain columns with labels, indicating that these columns contain sensitive or special-handling data. For instance, you may want to mark a column containing credit card numbers as « confidential », or sales numbers as « management only ».
The problem is that you can mark these columns all you want, but it won’t have any immediate effect. SQL Server does not actually change its behavior with these labels: it’s up to you to actually do whatever you need to do in your applications.
Let’s see how data classification