encryption impact

[Former Member]

hi folks, I am considering full encryption of one of my databases, and wanted to understand how to assess performance impact of full db vs (specific) table only encryption. Is there a recommended approach to assess performance degradation?

thanks much for any thoughts, Cosmin

[VolkerBarth · Accepted solution]

I do not know whether that will help, but here's a snippet from the (older) whitepaper "Securing SQL Anywhere Server 10", page 27 - I would think the relative overhead should be similar for newer versions and hardware, but as usually YMMV:

Performance analysis

Performance is only slightly impacted when data is encrypted because SQL Anywhere is very efficient in encrypting/decrypting data. In lab tests, when databases are encrypted with AES or AES_FIPS, the performance decrease is between 2-3% on data retrievals and as much as 5% on data insertion. These results are based on the insertion/retrieval of 2.5 million rows to and from a single table on a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz system with 1024 MB RAM.