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Oracle 11g has made the life of database administrators easy by allowing them to perform encryption on tablespace level. Instead of encrypting a single column we can now encrypt an entire tablespace.

When data is written to operating system files or to a backup device then data from encrypted tablespace remains encrypted. Thus this exciting feature has increased security concerns pertaining to data. Now it is quite easier to maintain Transparent Encryption.

Generally speaking, most of the features on one hand make your life easier but on the other hand they cost you and hence it should kept in mind that the encryption and decryption process will spend CPU time.

Transparent Tablespace Encryption:

You can perform encryption at indexes, Lobs and partitions as well. Oracle 11g tablespace encryption is performed at the block level. One notable thing about this exciting feature is that the tablespace encryption is transparent and it does not require you to perform any changes from the application side.

Oracle Transparent Tablespace Encryption Algorithms:

Oracle transparent data encryption feature encrypt tablespaces by using industry standard encryption algorithms. It supports Advanced encryption standard (AES) and Triple data encryption standard (3DES).

If no specific algorithm is not specified then by default 128-bit key encryption (AES128) is performed.

Creating Encrypted Tablespace:

Set ‘COMPATIBLE' parameter:

For creating encrypted tablespace first of all we need to set the initialization parameter ‘COMPATIBLE'. By default this parameter is set to 11.1.0 when you install Oracle 11g. The ‘COMPATIBLE' parameter should be set to 11.1.0 or higher value in order to encrypt a tablespace. You can check the value of this parameter by running below command.

SQL> show parameter COMPATIBLE

NAME                         TYPE        VALUE
——————— ———– ————
COMPATIBLE            string      11.1.0.0.0

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