Is it worth encrypting email addresses in the database?

Question

I\'m already using salted hashing to store passwords in my database, which means that I should be immune to rainbow table attacks.

I had a thought, though: what if s

Answer 1

Both SQL Server and Oracle (and I believe also others DBs) support encryption of data at the database level. If you want to encrypt something why don't simply abstract the access to the data that could be encrypted on the database server side and left the user choose if use the encrypted data (in this case the SQL command will be different) or not. If the user want to user encrypted data then it can configure the database server and all the maintenance work connected with key management is made using standard DBA tool, made from the DB vendor and not from you.