Security

Foreign Tables are not as Useful as I Hoped

When I heard about foreign tables using the new postgres_fdw foreign data wrapper in PostgreSQL 9.3, I was pretty excited. We hadn’t upgraded to 9.3 so I waited until we did before I did any serious testing. Having done more experimentation with it, I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed. Why? Because of how authentication was implemented. I’m going to get this out of the way now: The postgres_fdw foreign data wrapper only works with hard-coded plain-text passwords, forever the bane of security-conscious IT teams everywhere.