Performance Informix encryption
Marc Demhartner asked about performance cost of Informix encryption on 14.10.FC7 with large tables. Paul Watson and Art Kagel said Encryption at Rest has no noticeable impact beyond slightly higher CPU, while column-level encryption does cost; Paul relayed an unofficial IBM view against it. Art explained EAR covers all storage and SSL/PAM can encrypt client traffic.
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I wanted to ask you guys about your experience with performance degradation of enabled DB encryption in Informix. We have tables with 100 columns and 30 million records, does the activated inplace encryption of the Informix DB still play a big role or is it hardly measurable in terms of performance whether it is encrypted or not? Suggest we´re using 14.10FC7 with RHEL7 on some multicore CPU VMs ------------------------------ Marc Demhartner ------------------------------ #Informix
If you mean EAR then you won't notice it
Marc: I agree with Paul. If you are thinking of use Informix Encryption at Rest there is no noticeable impact. CPU usage will be a little bit higher, but if you are not bumping up against 0% idle now it's no biggie. If, on the other hand, you are talking about column level encryption, that's a different animal. There will be an impact. Art ------------------------------ Art S. Kagel, President and Principal Consultant ASK Database Management Corp. www.askdbmgt.com ------------------------------
The 110% unofficial line I got from IBM was do not use column level encryption cos <quote>its crap</quote>
Thanks for prompt reply - and the different option? in transit - so if only a few specific tables would be encrypted / decrypted during runtime ? ------------------------------ Marc Demhartner ------------------------------
Marc: Encryption at Rest (EAR) is at the server level. All storage for the instance is encrypted on disk and in flight between the disk and the server instance. Data is only decrypted when it is accessed inside the server. It would be all data in all tables. Then, separately, you can encrypt the data in flight to clients using SSL and PAM connection types making the encryption end-to-end. Art ------------------------------ Art S. Kagel, President and Principal Consultant ASK Database Management Corp. www.askdbmgt.com ------------------------------