Re: Deployment of PostgreSQL Applications

On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 08:59:53AM -0400, Mike Arace wrote:
> 2 questions:

I'll let someone else handle the first one.

> 2) More importantly, is it possible to prevent a customer from peeking into
> said database once it is deployed on their machine? A large part of what
> makes my application proprietary is the data model in the database, and it'd
> be tough to maintain a competative edge when everyone can see exactly how I
> do things in the database by logging into their postgres account, adding
> some users and changing permissions on their machine. I really need to make
> sure the database is bulletproof before I can begin deployment.

It's not really possible to hide a database schema. Once you've logged in,
all the information is there describing all the table and fields. This data
is used by the database itself to process your queries.

You could try to prevent logins into the database but if someone has root on
that machine that's really not hard to get around. At worst they could read
the database files directly.

Seriously though, I'm wondering about your situation, who owns the data in
the database? If it's your customer then shouldn't they have access to it?
You talk about the data model. Is it really such a special data model that
nobody else has thought of it before?

P.S. Fortunatly, you can't patent database schemas last time I checked so at
least the world is safe from that.

--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org>
http://svana.org/kleptog/
> It would be nice if someone came up with a certification system that
> actually separated those who can barely regurgitate what they crammed over
> the last few weeks from those who command secret ninja networking powers.