Hi Mike,

I've gone with a similar approach to encrypt columns in my production database. I did some benchmarking while selecting a lot of rows in a single select query. And found that using DecryptByKeyAutoCert explicitly in the select query is 10 times quicker than calling a custom UDF which in turn does the same DecryptByKeyAutoCert. Not sure why this is slow when it's encapsulated in a custom Decrypt function.

--Ryan