Using multiple cryptographic keys for encryption?
A more standard way is not to make any of this yourself.  Use a proper database like Oracle 11g.  It's all built in.  And you can even use it for free in some circumstances.

You think that it's simple just to AES some records in, but there's a great deal more for a production system.  Oracle have spent millions developing all this functionality and vastly more like key and privileged user management and backup/restore whilst addressing all the performance issues.  How would you handle encrypted joins for example?  You won't do better building something yourself.

Have a look at their transparent data encryption FAQ.