PG Phriday

Postgres and Rust go together like peanut butter and chocolate, or ice-cream and root beer, or Batman and Robin, or mice and cheese, or sand on a beach, or crabs and elephants! Err, maybe scratch that last one.

Well regardless, there’s a whole lot of Rust going on in the Postgres world these days, especially thanks to contributions from the PGRX project. As a relative novice to Rust, I figured it was time to see what all the fuss was about and tentatively dip a foot into those turbulent and unforgiving waters.

Not every database-backed application needs to be locked down like Fort Knox. Sometimes there are even roles that leverage blanket access to large swathes of available data, if not every table, simply for auditing or monitoring purposes. Normally this would require quite a bit of preparation or ongoing privilege management, but Postgres came up with a unique solution starting with version 14: predefined roles. This topic comes up relatively frequently in Postgres chats like Discord, Slack, and IRC.

Sometimes when we have an existing database and schema full of tables, there comes a time when we need to perform a migration. Maybe it’s because we want to move to or from a cloud service. Perhaps we have a small database and want to do a quick version upgrade via dump / restore. Whatever the reason, we may decide to clean up some technical debt while we’re making the transition.

Many Postgres experts recommend against creating objects in the public schema. This is the default schema that exists in nearly all Postgres databases, and there are often implicit grants that could make our objects available in unexpected scenarios. It’s also a cluttered namespace if all tables, views, functions, etc., are created there by default. Using it is sloppy and makes future data or operation segregation much more difficult.

So how can we move a bunch of existing stuff out of the public schema safely?

Remember this guy? Robo-Postgres returns! AI is all anyone talks about these days, isn’t it? Even when it comes to databases like Postgres, devs are finding new and innovative ways to leverage LLMs in everyday use cases. Can you really blame them though? This is an exciting new technology that will transform how we work and potentially society as a whole once it finally matures. We even covered building a crude RAG app a few short weeks ago.

Have you ever wanted to use a non-superuser role in a Postgres database to perform actions that are normally restricted? Even something as simple as reading from the pg_stat_activity view requires special permissions to view the query column because it could contain sensitive information.