Working with an encrypted database

I'm soon going to be starting a CI project where there is a requirement for the database to be encrypted as it will store sensitive client data.

I've not worked with database encryption before but I'm assuming that I can use the the encryption library to encrypt data that is saved to the database, and to decrypt any information coming from the database. Is that straight-forward to set up and is there anything else I need to consider?

One issue that has occurred to me is how to manage searching the database fields. One of the requirements is for a client lookup search based on name, address, dob etc. However if these fields are encrypted then a fulltext search isn't going to work. Has anyone encountered this issue before and if so how did you overcome it?

The only solution that I can currently think of is to generate a temporary table with the search data and to destroy it afterwards. This is obviously not going to be very efficient, but is the best that I can currently come up with. Any other suggestions welcome!

TIA