Category: Administration

Rafia Sabih announces a new extension:

How about a situation when you want to log all the login attempts made to your PostgreSQL server. Yes, one way would be to read your log files and find out all the information related to login attempts and then transfer to them some other file, etc. to further use this information. Now, this is one way of doing it but it might pose some challenges like time and memory consumption in reading from those long files, additionally this is going to incur a lot of I/O which might be a serious issue when you are on cloud. During my time working for Zalando, we came across this problem and decided to write a Postgres extension to handle this efficiently.

Click through to learn more about the pg_auth_mon extension and how it works, including a link to the GitHub repository.

Ben Johnston continues a series on auditing:

This continues my series on auditing SQL Server. The fist parts covered discovery and documentation, server level hardware audits and SQL Server engine level audits. This section examines database configuration audits. As with the previous audit sections, the boundaries for the audit can be blurry. I try to stick to configuration items only, but I also discuss some code smells and items that can impact performance or might be covered in a code review. You will need to determine the scope of your audits and how much you want to cover in this portion of the audit.

This follows the patterns of the previous audits, starting with a list of items to validate, followed by key points to examine for each of those items, and ends with scripts or tactics to gather the actual audit results. As with previous audits, there are multiple methods to examine each item, but I generally prefer scripts due to their repeatability, especially when they need to be run by another team.

Read on for a general template, followed by details on each section.