A few days ago, we (Artem and Chris) were working with two different customers that had the same requirement: they needed to encrypt certain tables in their databases. This is not uncommon. Encryption comes with a slight performance penalty, so many companies prefer not to encrypt their entire database. Instead, the best practice is to encrypt only the tables that contain sensitive information, so less-sensitive data can be accessed without the overhead the encryption creates.

Django is a high-level flexible framework for building Python applications quickly. Applications run on Django store data, by default, into a SQLite database file, but lots of Django users find themselves needing to switch to a more performant database in production, one with better availability or scalability.