Column and table encryption

If you only want to encrypt portions of your database, you can choose to encrypt columns or tables.

Column encryption can be performed on any column in any table at any time. Table encryption requires that the database have table encryption enabled. Table encryption is enabled at database creation (initialization) time.

• To encrypt tables – You can use the following:

  • Initialization utility (iqinit).

  • CREATE DATABASE statement.

  • ALTER DATABASE statement.

  • CREATE ENCRYPTED TABLE DATABASE statement.

• To encrypt columns – ENCRYPT function.
• To encrypt materialized views – ALTER MATERIALIZED VIEW statement.

• Column encryption
  To encrypt columns in your database, use the ENCRYPT function. The ENCRYPT function uses the same AES strong encryption algorithm that is used for database encryption to encrypt values that are passed to it.
• Table encryption
  Table encryption allows you to encrypt tables or materialized views with sensitive data without the performance impact that encrypting the entire database might cause. When table encryption is enabled, table pages for the encrypted table, associated index pages, and temporary file pages are encrypted. The transaction log pages that contain transactions on encrypted tables are also encrypted.
• Enabling table encryption in a database (SQL)
  Create a database with table encryption by using the CREATE DATABASE statement, or enable table encryption in an existing database by using the CREATE ENCRYPTED TABLE DATABASE statement.
• Enabling table encryption in a database (iqinit utility)
  You can enable table encryption during the creation of a database, using the command line.
• Encrypting a table
  You can create an encrypted table using the CREATE TABLE statement, or encrypt an existing table using the ALTER TABLE statement.