Re: Performance of column level encryption

On Mon, 2007-07-30 at 22:33 +0000, mohitanchlia@gmail.com wrote: > Version: IDS 10 > > We have need to encrypt few columns of the database. One of the > options I looked at was encryption functions provided by informix. > But, when I asked some of the consultant they told us that Informix > has performance issues in using their encryption functions. They > recommend to NOT use informix's encryption function. I wanted to know > if this is the case, and if yes, then is it going to be improved in > next versions of IDS. I haven't used column-level encryption myself yet, so please take the following advice with a grain of salt. *ANY* encryption mechanism will impact performance, because you're asking the computer to do more work than it would do without encryption. If you must encrypt, you have no choice about incurring this performance hit. Your only choice is whether this performance hit is incurred on the client(s) or on the server, if client and server are actually physically different computers. The advantage of doing encryption on the server is that the functionality is built-in, and I would imagine that the smart guys over in Lenexa are using state-of-the-art implementations of state-of-the-art algorithms. I don't know if the same could be said for whatever you choose to bolt on to the client side. (I can't help but wonder what your consultant recommends instead.) The only advantage of doing the work client-side is that the workload is distributed across multiple CPUs. I suggest you actually run performance tests of no encryption versus server-side encryption versus client-side encryption. *If* you can't get satisfactory performance, *then* ask for speedup suggestions. Until then, anything else is pure speculation and premature optimization. Hope this helps, -- Carsten Haese http://informixdb.sourceforge.net