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Came across this while google-surfing:

<quote>
Disk space is an issue with database encryption because encrypted fields are larger than unencrypted fields. They're a little larger for textual data and a lot larger for numeric and binary data--data in a numeric field, for example, gets encrypted one byte at a time and grows to two bytes when it's encrypted. [...]

Most database-encryption mechanisms present encrypted data as characters, one character per hexadecimal digit. That's a big increase: When encrypted, a 4-byte integer becomes an 8-byte character string. Most encryption algorithms use 64-bit DES, so your 4-byte (32-bit) integer becomes a string of 16 encrypted characters.
</quote>

The mind boggles.

SQLcrypt operates at the storage layer and cares not whether the data is textual or numeric at the SQL layer. One byte of plain text <=> one byte of cipher text.