Book Image

PostgreSQL 11 Administration Cookbook

By : Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli, Sudheer Kumar Meesala
Book Image

PostgreSQL 11 Administration Cookbook

By: Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli, Sudheer Kumar Meesala

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source database management system with an enviable reputation for high performance and stability. With many new features in its arsenal, PostgreSQL 11 allows you to scale up your PostgreSQL infrastructure. This book takes a step-by-step, recipe-based approach to effective PostgreSQL administration. The book will introduce you to new features such as logical replication, native table partitioning, additional query parallelism, and much more to help you to understand and control, crash recovery and plan backups. You will learn how to tackle a variety of problems and pain points for any database administrator such as creating tables, managing views, improving performance, and securing your database. As you make steady progress, the book will draw attention to important topics such as monitoring roles, backup, and recovery of your PostgreSQL 11 database to help you understand roles and produce a summary of log files, ensuring high availability, concurrency, and replication. By the end of this book, you will have the necessary knowledge to manage your PostgreSQL 11 database efficiently.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Encrypting sensitive data


This recipe shows you how to encrypt data using the pgcrypto contrib package.

Getting ready

Make sure you (and/or your database server) are in a country where encryption is not illegal—it still is in some countries.

In order to create and manage PGP keys, you also need the well-known GnuPG command-line utility, which is available on practically all distributions.

pgcrypto is part of the contrib collection. Starting from version 10, on Debian and Ubuntu it is part of the main postgresql-10 server package, while in previous versions there was a separate package, for example, postgresql-contrib-9.6.

Install it on the database in which you want to use it, following the Adding an external module to PostgreSQL recipe from Chapter 3, Configuration.

You also need to have PGP keys set up:

pguser@laptop:~$ gpg --gen-key

Answer some questions here (the defaults are OK, unless you are an expert), select the key type as DSA and Elgamal, and enter an empty password.

Now, export the keys...