How do I encrypt a string and get a equal length encrypted string?

Question

My problem is the following:

In an existing database I want to encrypt data in a couple of columns. The columns contains strings of different lengths.

I don\

Answer 1

You should take a minute and think of the real problem you're trying to solve. I've seen very few instances where database encryption was really nessecary, since information rarely flows directly from the database to an end user.

If you need to protect content of the database, then you should perhaps look into its standard access control mechanisms instead.