1. A computer program stored on a storage medium for encrypting a field value stored in a database system, the computer program comprising a set of instructions operable to cause the database system to: receive the field value; identify types of language characters in the field value; select an encoding scheme from among multiple different encoding schemes to encode the field value based on the types of language characters in the field value; use the selected encoding scheme to encode the field value into a byte array; encrypt the byte array; and store the encrypted byte array.