Every day, thousands of engineers work tirelessly to make data more accurate, reliable, and up-to-date. But sometimes, we need to do the exact opposite—corrupt it.

Whether it’s masking or replacing sensitive information, or even generating entirely new datasets while preserving key business properties, data obfuscation is a crucial task. It’s essential for testing systems, sharing data with third parties, and more. However, given the complexity of data schemas and business logic, this is far from trivial.

In this talk, we’ll explore the challenges of working with artificial data and discuss various approaches to solving them using PostgreSQL’s built-in features and external extensions.