Comment by ing33k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ing33k | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

it's a very useful feature to have.

if you use Heroku Postgres Database ( production tier ), they have a fork feature as well.

if you are running Postgres on your own and for relatively small loads, it's quite trivial to create a copy of the db using Template

    CREATE DATABASE new_db TEMPLATE = old_db;

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/manage-ag-templat...

While not the responsibility of a DB vendor, it would be nice if this includes some Data anonymization/randomization option.

Great tip on the Postgres templates, they're a very much underused feature.

Fully agreed on the data anonymization, and it's something we'll think about in the future. Prior to Citus I ran product for Heroku Postgres for a number of years and the engineering team behind our database as a service is the early team that also built Heroku Postgres so it's much of the same product we aimed to create here. Anonymization absolutely makes sense we just have to figure out the right way to deliver it.

I think one viable way is if you provide some way to insert hooks or triggers for user to be able to amend data as they want. Maybe for some having ability to mark fields to be filled with auto generated names/addresses will be enough though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com