I have a client that is wondering if anyone has experience with
encrypted BLOBs and IDS. Anyone? They haven't started using them yet,
but are wondering about performance implications and other pertinent
issues, good or bad.

I assume they're v7 blobs btw, not slobs (uh - smartblobs that is...)

Thanks -
Mark Scranton

mark.scranton@gmail.com wrote:
> I have a client that is wondering if anyone has experience with
> encrypted BLOBs and IDS. Anyone? They haven't started using them yet,
> but are wondering about performance implications and other pertinent
> issues, good or bad.
>
> I assume they're v7 blobs btw, not slobs (uh - smartblobs that is...)

If they are BYTE and TEXT (non-smart blobs), then they aren't encrypted
by standard IDS facilities, so the performance is under their control.

The version 10 column-level encryption functions can handle any data
type except BYTE and TEXT.

Assuming you are using BLOB and CLOB types, BLOBs are not Base-64
encoded, so they grow by a constant amount. CLOBs, on the other hand,
are Base-64 encoded, so (in the limit) they are expanded to about 4/3
times the original size when encrypted (N bytes input becomes 4N/3 + X
for a modest value of X).

--
Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h>
Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com
Guardian of DBD::Informix v2007.0226 -- http://dbi.perl.org/