Shouldn't the AESEncrypt and AESDecrypt functions work with varbinary instead of varchar ?

[nicolasriousset]

The encryption_package AESEncrypt function returns a varchar value, while AESDecrypt takes a varchar value to decrypt.

Is there any reason why varchar is used instead of varbinary ? It feels like the latter would make more sense, and would respect the MySQL functions signature.

To keep backward compatibility, instead of simply altering methods signature, one could rely on Vertica function overloading support
However, this would only work for the decrypt function, since overloading cannot be done on the return type.