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@kzsu.stanford.edu]
Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 4:43 PM
To: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
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?
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