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From: jas@llama.Ingres.COM (Jim Shankland)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: data stored in encrypted format
Message-ID: <1990Jul31.015056.5484@ingres.Ingres.COM>
Date: 31 Jul 90 01:50:56 GMT
References: <43386@apple.Apple.COM> <226@cti1.UUCP>
Reply-To: jas@llama.Ingres.COM (Jim Shankland)
Distribution: na
Organization: The Eddie Group
Lines: 17

In article <226@cti1.UUCP> mpledger@cti1.UUCP (Mark Pledger) writes:
>[Regarding an inquiry about DMBS's that support encrypting data written
>to disk:]
>
>Why not define your field and write your own encription/decription [sic]
>routine which would encript/decript on the fly (or something like that)?
>There are plenty of encription/decription [sic] algorithms floating around.

That is probably fine for some applications, but will make many keyed
lookups impossible.  (I.e., How will you get the equivalent of
"select * from emp where hire_date < 1-jan-87"?  If you end up selecting
all rows, decrypting each one, and checking the hire_date, you lose
badly against an encrypting DBMS that has the table indexed on hire_date.)

jas

These are my opinions; Ingres Corp. neither knows nor cares about them.