Patent ID: 8819770

Claim:
A computer system comprising the following: one or more processors; system memory; one or more computer-readable storage media having stored thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, causes the computing system to perform a method for mapping encryption policies to user data stored in a database using a policy column uniform resource identifier (URI), the method comprising the following: an act of receiving the following: a database schema name that identifies the name of a specified schema within a relational database in which at least a portion of a user's data is stored, a table name that identifies a specified table within the relational database, a column name that identifies a specified column in the specified table and a namespace identifier that identifies a set of relational databases where each column identified by the column name has the same semantics for each database in the set; an act of receiving an indication that identifies which type of encryption is to be applied when encrypting the column of data specified by the column name; and an act of generating a policy column URI, wherein the policy column URI comprises a hierarchical string comprising the namespace identifier, the database schema name, the table name and the column name.