Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful opensource database management system; now recognized as the expert's choice for a wide range of applications, it has an enviable reputation for performance and stability. PostgreSQL provides an integrated feature set comprising relational database features, object-relational, text search, Geographical Info Systems, analytical tools for big data and JSON/XML document management. Starting with short and simple recipes, you will soon dive into core features, such as configuration, server control, tables, and data. You will tackle a variety of problems a database administrator usually encounters, from creating tables to managing views, from improving performance to securing your database, and from using monitoring tools to using storage engines. Recipes based on important topics such as high availability, concurrency, replication, backup and recovery, as well as diagnostics and troubleshooting are also given special importance. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to run, manage, and maintain PostgreSQL efficiently.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

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.

Make sure that pgcrypto is installed on your database host. On Debian and Ubuntu, it comes with the postgresql-contrib-9.6 package (change 9.6 for other PostgreSQL versions).

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...