Eymoutiers, France, July 2nd, 2025
We're publishing PostgreSQL Anonymizer 2.3 today, introducing the long awaited
replica masking mechanism. Database Administrators can now synchronize a "masked
clone" with their production database using PostgreSQL logical replication.
PostgreSQL Anonymizer is an extension that hides or replaces personally
identifiable information (PII) or commercially sensitive data from a PostgreSQL
database.
The extension offers five different masking strategies:
Each strategy is complemented by an enhanced suite of Masking Functions, including advanced techniques such as: Substitution, Randomization, Faking, Pseudonymization, Partial Scrambling, Shuffling, Noise Addition and Generalization.
The extension can be installed with Debian and RPM packages, an Ansible role, a docker image, etc. It is also available on major DBaaS providers including : Alibaba Cloud, Crunchy Bridge, Google Cloud SQL, Microsoft Azure Database, Neon, etc.
See the INSTALL section of the documentation for more details!
In some situations, you may want to have an anonymized copy of your production database on another instance like with Backup Masking (aka "Anonymized Dumps") but you also would like this copy to be up-to-date with the original data like with Dynamic Masking…
With the Replica Masking feature, you can use PostgreSQL logical replication to create an anonymized clone of your production database.
See the documentation for more details.
WARNING! DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION
This feature is currently under heavy development. This implementation of Replica Masking is provided for testing purpose only. Major breaking changes may be introduced at any time and we may even remove this feature entirely if we feel it does not reach our standard of quality and stability.
We welcome any feedback, testing reports, comments and contributions. But for the moment, we do not guarantee any form of support for this feature.
Our current plan is to stabilize this feature in version 3.0, which is scheduled for early 2026.
This release also includes code, bugfixes, documentation, code reviews and ideas from Robin Portigliatti, Suhas Thalanki, Benoit Lobréau and other contributors.
And also special thanks to the PGRX team for their amazing work!
PostgreSQL Anonymizer is part of the Dalibo Labs initiative. It is mainly developed by Damien Clochard.
This is an open project, contributions are welcome. We need your feedback and ideas! Let us know what you think of this tool, how it fits your needs and what features are missing.
If you want to help, you can find a list of Junior Jobs.