Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function decrypts text that was encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm with a 128-bit key length, reversing the AES_ENCRYPT() function. The function unlocks the encrypted string with the password given as the second argument. It returns NULL if one of the given parameters is NULL. This is available as of version 4.0.2 of MySQL. Here is an example:

SELECT AES_DECRYPT(personal, 'my_password') AS Personal
FROM teachers
WHERE teacher_id='730522';

+----------+
| Personal |
+----------+
| text     |
+----------+

In this example, the value for the personal column is decrypted using the password given. The result is just the plain text of the column.