Today people are depending more on the corporate data for decision making, management of customer service and supply chain management etc. Any loss, corrupted data or unavailability of data may seriously affect its performance. The database security should provide protected access to the contents of a database and should preserve the integrity, availability, consistency, and quality of the data In this paper, we analyze and compare five traditional architectures for database encryption. We show that existing architectures may provide a high level of security, but have a significant impact on performance and impose major changes to the application layer, or may be transparent to the application layer and provide high performance, but have several fundamental security weaknesses. We suggest a sixth novel architecture that was not considered before. The new architecture is based on placing the encryption module inside the database management software (DBMS), just above the database cache, and using a dedicated technique to encrypt each database value together with its coordinates.