Schedule - PGConf.DE 2025
Best practices for creating Ephemeral Environments with PII for Postgres
Date: 2025-05-09
Time: 10:15–11:00
Room: Ballsaal 3
Level: Beginner
Testing changes against a Postgres database is critical, but the common practice of replicating production databases comes with significant challenges: handling sensitive PII data, managing high costs, and dealing with excessive data volumes. These hurdles can slow down development and introduce privacy concerns.
In this talk, I’ll share practical strategies for overcoming these challenges while optimising for cost and speed. First, I’ll explore techniques for anonymising production data, ensuring privacy compliance while maintaining data integrity and usefulness. For companies working with terabytes of data, I’ll discuss the importance of effective sampling to downsize datasets to manageable gigabytes, reducing complexity and costs.
Drawing from our experience managing hundreds of thousands of PostgreSQL databases for our customers, we’ve found that one of their biggest challenges is maintaining development speed. One major bottleneck is developers waiting to test their pull requests against the database. By using copy-on-write branching from your staging environment, you can give every developer their own isolated database instance. This approach accelerates iteration and testing while keeping infrastructure costs under control.