Securing data against a breach is a mandatory task. Data security can be breached through different techniques. A database user can reuse the default database privileges to gain information about other users, execute certain user functions, or monitor pg_stat_activity. Also, some data can be sniffed using tcpdump; so, one should use SSL connections to secure the network traffic. In this chapter, PostgreSQL security is tackled from the authorization, authentication, and data encryption aspects; however, one also should protect the code against SQL injection and other known security issues, such as function cost, and view the security barrier as shown in the previous chapters.

The next chapter will focus on the PostgreSQL system catalog and introduce several recipes to maintain the database. The recipes will be used to extract potential problems in the database, such as missing indexes and introduce the solutions to tackle these problems.