I spent yesterday looking at the Tablespace Encryption feature in Oracle 11g. If you’ve used the Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) feature in 10g release 2, you’ll see this is more of the same. The difference here is eveything in the tablespace is encrypted, rather than having to decide on a column-by-column basis. Just create the appropriate tablespace and Bob’s your uncle!
You may notice the article conveniently side-steps the Hardware Security Modules related functionality. I don’t have one so I can’t test it out. 🙂
For most of the stuff I work on, encrypting all the columns in a table is overkill, but I guess there are some areas where this is a big priority. It’s good to know it’s there in case you ever need it. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…