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From: Andres Freund <[email protected]>
To: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
Cc: pgsql-hackers <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Transparent column encryption
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2023 10:47:58 -0700
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
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Hi,

On 2023-03-21 18:05:15 +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 16.03.23 17:36, Andres Freund wrote:
> > Maybe a daft question, but why do we need a separate type and typmod for
> > encrypted columns? Why isn't the fact that the column is encrypted exactly one
> > new field, and we use the existing type/typmod fields?
> 
> The way this is implemented is that for an encrypted column, the real
> atttypid and atttypmod are one of the encrypted special types
> (pg_encrypted_*).  That way, most of the system doesn't need to care about
> the details of encryption or whatnot, it just unpacks tuples etc. by looking
> at atttypid, atttyplen, etc., and queries on encrypted data behave normally
> by just looking at what operators etc. those types have.  This approach
> heavily contains the number of places that need to know about this feature
> at all.

I get that for the type, but why do we need the typmod duplicated as well?

Greetings,

Andres Freund

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