Jeff Davis

Citus 10 is out! Check out the Citus 10 blog post for all the details. Citus is an open source extension to Postgres (not a fork) that enables scale-out, but offers other great features, too. See the Citus docs and the Citus github repo and README.

This post will highlight Citus Columnar, one of the big new features in Citus 10. You can also take a look at the columnar documentation. Citus Columnar can be used with or without the scale-out features of Citus.

Postgres typically stores data using the heap access method, which is row-based storage. Row-based tables are good for transactional workloads, but can cause excessive IO for some analytic queries.

Columnar storage is a new way to store data in a Postgres table. Columnar groups data together by column instead of by row; and compresses the data, too. Arranging data by column tends to compress well, and it also means that queries can skip over columns they don’t need. Columnar dramatically reduces the IO needed to answer a typical analytic query—often by 10X!

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Making security easy to use is crucial because hard-to-use security is likely to be neglected entirely. SCRAM with channel binding is a variation of password authentication that is almost as easy to use, but much more secure.

In basic password authentication, the connecting client simply sends the server the password. Then the server checks that it's the right one, and allows the client to connect. Basic password authentication has several weaknesses which are addressed with SCRAM and channel binding.

In this article, you'll learn how to set up authentication using SCRAM with channel binding in Postgres. I implemented the client connection parameter channel_binding in PostgreSQL 13, due to be released in late 2020 (PostgreSQL 13 is in beta now). SCRAM and Channel Binding have already been supported in several releases, but this new connection parameter is necessary to realize the security benefits of SCRAM and Channel Binding.

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