You have an Azure subscription that contains an Azure SQL database named SQL1.

Column2, which contains government ID numbers, is the appropriate column for deterministic encryption. Always Encrypted deterministic encryption always generates the same ciphertext for the same plaintext value. That characteristic enables operations such as equality comparisons, point lookups, grouping, equality joins, and indexing on encrypted columns. Microsoft specifically uses identifiers such as SSNs or government ID numbers as canonical examples of data that should use deterministic encryption when applications need to search for a specific identifier. Microsoft Learn

Microsoft documentation explicitly states that deterministic encryption is suitable for columns used as search or grouping parameters , giving a government ID number as an example. Microsoft Learn

Column1 , containing confidential investigation comments, is generally better suited to randomized encryption because narrative text is not normally used for exact-match lookup and stronger protection against pattern analysis is preferable. Column3 and Column4 , containing images and videos, are binary large-object data; image-type data in particular is not supported by Always Encrypted, and these objects are not the intended use case for deterministic equality-based encryption.