Hi Christian,
It would never happened.
Password is supposed to be secret and guarded.
If SAP is giving you a method to decrypt the password, then they are compromising the security of the system it self.
I agree with Frank Wang, Recordset object only put a wrapper to your SQL query and execute it in DBServer.
In terms of performance, I have never had much different. Especially when you said simple queries.
Can you give us your simple query and let us try so we can learn together ?
Regards
Edy