PgConf.Russia 2020

Role-based access control (RBAC) is one of the main mechanisms used for access control in many DBMS, including PostgreSQL. This model is a sub-type of traditional discretionary access control with its restrictions. In addition to DAC, many operating systems also use mandatory access control (MAC) based on security labels. This additional security mechanism is obligatory for protecting information that demands higher levels of security. Naturally, we would like to use MAC within DBMS when working in OS with mandatory access control switched on.
In this talk, we'll give an overview of existing MAC implementations in DBMS, as well as share our approach to using security mechanisms provided by SELinux, the sepgsql extension for PostgreSQL, and the standard mechanism of row-level security (RLS), which has been available in PostgreSQL starting from version 9.5.
In our presentation, we will use the "Airlines" demo database provided by the Postgres Professional company to show how to protect sensitive information and personal data, compare different ways of storing security labels, and assess performance of our solution.

PostgreSQL 13 Feature Freeze is scheduled for April 2020. Two more commitfests are still accepting new patches. What we can say about PostgreSQL 13. It's possible that rotation rule will work so that new release wouldn't have as many new features as PostgreSQL 12 have. If even it is do, that would be good evolutionary release with a lot of medium feature and infrastructure changes, which prepares postgres for new leap. In this talk I will overview expected novelties in PostgreSQL 13. It would be more or less accurate, since there would be only one commitfest left, which results are possible to forecast.

We would like to share our test results (including performance testing) of PostgreSQL/Citrus and MongoDB for our company's data. It has been a very exciting process with unexpected turns and a somewhat controversial outcome.

We will discuss stored procedures and functions, as well as the code within the database in general. We'll take a look at stored procedures from different angles: as a DBA, a database developer, and a backend developer. We will try to understand the specifics of stored procedures that often go against the common coding guidelines, and discuss best practices for working with stored procedures.
This is mainly a motivational talk for database and backend developers, not an advanced tech talk.