How to Fix the PKIX Certificate Error After Upgrading SonarQube

After I updated SonarQube to version 9.7, I got this strange entry in the logs:

Caused by: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target

Should you run into the same error, append a ;encrypt=false to the connection string to your SQL Server database:

sonar.jdbc.url=jdbc:sqlserver://localhost;databaseName=SonarDB;encrypt=false

I saw a similar error shortly before in ASP.NET 7 and tried the solution for Entity Framework. To my surprise, it worked with SonarQube as well.