Humm, I am unaware of any Oracle feature that does disk encryption. There is a built-in package that allows one to encrypt the data as it is on it's way to the table, but nothing to encrypt the data on it's way to the disk. Your friend may have been mislead by the fact that Oracle writes it's data files as hex encoded data vs. plain ASCII. Dick Goulet Senior Oracle DBA Oracle Certified 8i DBA -----Original Message----- From: Joseph Brenner [mailto:doom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 4:43 PM To: pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ADMIN] Disk Encryption - Postgresql vs. Oracle I was talking to someone just recently who was saying that they were thinking about going with Oracle rather than Postgresql because Oracle has a their story in place about how to do disk encryption. So I am of course, looking into how to do it with Postgresql... (As to why you would *care* about disk encryption, I would guess the scenario is you've got a bunch of guys in the back room hot-swapping RAID drives, and you'd rather not post armed guards there to watch what happens to the older units.) contrib/pgcrypto looks pretty interesting, but I gather it's intended to let you encrypt particular fields inside a database, rather than the whole ball of wax. Maybe the right way to do it is to just get the OS to encrypt everything, and not make postgresql jump through any extra hoops? I see there's a general Linux disk encryption FAQ out there: http://www.telenovela-world.com/~spade/linux/howto/Disk-Encryption-HOWTO /index.html Doing some searches of the archives, I haven't turned up much discussion more recent than about a year ago, e.g. http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2004-03/msg00049.php Is there anything new on this front? ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
