Re: Would PostgreSQL 16 native transparent data encryption support database level encryption?

Greetings,

Please don't top-post on these lists.

* Tony Xu (tony(dot)xu(at)rubrik(dot)com) wrote:
> Our use-case is for a multi-tenancy scenario - we are considering using
> different databases to store different customer's data, however, for
> cost-efficiency, we want to host them in the same server (to reduce the
> CPU/mem idle time and to reduce the server management efforts). Now there
> is a compliance related feature that we need to let our customer control
> the KEK for their databases so they can rotate their KEKs independently, so
> we cannot use one KEK for the whole PG server. Conceptually, different
> databases are independent of each other, it also makes sense to allow them
> to have completely independent encryption facilities?

This really isn't currently in the plans and while it might be something
added later, as pointed out farther down on this thread, it wouldn't be
possible for the shared catalogs or the WAL to have separate keys for
those things which are relevant to a database, so it's not like each
tenant would actually have control over the key for "all" of their data
(consider that roles are stored in a shared PG catalog and then shared
among databases...).

To meet this compliance requirement, you'd certainly be much more able
to blanket claim that everything is independent by having a separate PG
instance for each client. This would also allow rather useful things
like being able to do a file-based restore on a per-client basis in the
event something happens, rather than having to roll back an entire
cluster to some point in time just because one client did something
bad.. You'd also be able to scale the number of systems supporting a
given client independently.

Thanks,

Stephen