Database outsourcing is becoming increasingly popular introducing a new paradigm, called database-as-a-service (DAS), where an organization’s database is stored at an external service provider. In such a scenario, access control is a very important issue, especially if the data owner wishes to publish her data for external use. In this paper, we first present our approach for the implementation of access control through selective encryption. The focus of the paper is then the presentation of the experimental results, which demonstrate the applicability of our proposal.