pg_masking VS sqitch

Last time I tried it though, it didn't play well with transaction variables (`current_setting(my.username)`). So you could not combine it with RLS logic and application users[5]. I'll be exploring an alternative on https://github.com/steve-chavez/pg_masking.

[1]: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2-for-zos/12?topic=statements-...

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/s...

[3]: https://postgresql-anonymizer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/decla...

[4]: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/application-users-vs-row...

Yeah, I fully agree. The tooling for putting that much logic into the database is just not great. I've been decently happy with Sqitch[0] for DB change management, but even with that you don't really get a good basis for testing some of the logic you could otherwise test in isolation in app code.

I've also tried to rely heavily on the database handling security and authorization, but as soon as you start to do somewhat non-trivial attribute-/relationship-based authorization (as you would find in many products nowadays), it really isn't fun anymore, and you spend a lot of the time you saved on manually building backend routes on trying to fit you authz model into those basic primitives (and avoiding performance bottlenecks). Especially compares to other modern authz solutions like OPA[1] or oso[2] it really doesn't stack up.

[0]: https://github.com/sqitchers/sqitch

[1]: https://www.openpolicyagent.org

[2]: https://www.osohq.com

We use https://sqitch.org/ and we’re fairly happy with it. Sqitch manages the files to deploy which are applied fits to a local database.

We use GitHub actions for deployment and database migrations are just one step of the pipeline. The step invokes sqitch deploy which runs all the pending migration files.

Then, all the approval process is standard for the environment. We require approvals in pull requests before merging to the main branch.

I'm experimenting with it right now using Squitch [1] to make maintenance easier. It still feels like a hack and I also still have my doubts about the viability of this for real-world use. It's fun though and I'm learning about all kinds of advanced Postgres features.

[1] https://sqitch.org/

For developing I find the official Perl docker images, running on a lightweight version of Debian, to be perfectly fine. Later on you might hand roll the skinniest possible image but the beauty of this setup is you can do that later and you don't need to change anything else. There's really not a lot going on here. First I declare the base image, which is as I said the official Perl image. I'm not using the latest Perl here because the application uses Sqitch for managing database migrations and that needs an update (there's a PR pending) to run on the most recent Perl so we'll just use a very nearly recent one instead. WORKDIR just defines where your application is installed. You can put it anywhere you want within reason. I like simple things so I use the most simple of all the conventions I've seen around.

Also, https://sqitch.org/

Some possible upsides of codd: - No need to manually write verification SQL. Codd will update schema representation files when you codd add some-migration.sql and will compare those to the actual schema when deploying (I'd say in ways which would be very hard to replicate manually, see an example of what codd checks, giving you the option to rollback if they don't match or proceed but log non-matching db objects. - It seems to be much simpler to set codd up. You need 3 env vars to start, a folder to store your migrations and a self-contained statically linked executable. Just codd add migration.sql your way in after that - This might be very wrong as I couldn't find it explicitly documented, but this GH issue suggests it's not so simple to apply all pending migrations in a single transaction with Sqitch? Maybe it requires some bundling or something along those lines and then it's fine, though. In any case, codd will do this automatically when you run codd up (provided postgresql allows it).