PGConf.Russia 2018

In this talk, I will tell you the story of how a bunch of sysadmins got sick of having to resuscitate their petabyte-sized Elasticsearch cluster and decided to replace it with some tried technologies: PostgreSQL, Kafka, a bit of Redis, lots of glue, and the typical sysadmin stubbornness. The result is Bagger: the sysadmin answer to Big Data. A fast, fairly reliable, fault-tolerant store, used mostly for logging timestamped events for some amount of time. Bagger is named the Bagger series of bucket-wheel excavators, feats of German engineering and some of the largest land vehicles ever produced by man. Just like the excavators that dig through tons of material, our Bagger digs through tons data.

Last year we announced Skala-SR / Postgres Pro database machine with a hardware and software support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) as a key feature. The first appliances have been already installed at customer sites, and even with the first version customers got some constructions, that were impossible without RDMA and CPU offload (got with Mellanox networking). However, capabilities of this equipment are much wider, and this talk is dedicated to current works and prospective developments for this topic.

This talk explores the ways attackers with no authorized database access can steal Postgres passwords, see database queries and results, and even intercept database sessions and return false data. Postgres supports features to eliminate all of these threats, but administrators must understand the attack vulnerabilities to protect against them. This talk covers all known Postgres external attack methods.

The presentation describes crypto-related parameters of PostgreSQL configuration (both authentication and TLS-protection of the connection to DB) and what do they mean