Re: Moving forward with TDE - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

> There's clearly user demand for it as there's a number of organizations
> who have forks which are providing it in one shape or another.  This
> kind of splintering of the community is actually an actively bad thing
> for the project and is part of what killed Unix, by at least some pretty
> reputable accounts, in my view.

Yes, the number of commercial implementations of this is a concern.  Of
course, it is also possible that those commercial implementations are
meeting checkbox requirements rather than technical ones, and the
community has been hostile to check box-only features.

I’ve grown weary of this argument as the other major piece of work it was routinely applied to was RLS and yet that has certainly been seen broadly as a beneficial feature with users clearly leveraging it and in more than some “checkbox” way.

Indeed, it’s similar also in that commercial implementations were done of RLS while there were arguments made about it being a checkbox feature which were used to discourage it from being implemented in core.  Were it truly checkbox, I don’t feel we would have the regular and ongoing discussion about it on the lists that we do, nor see other tools built on top of PG which specifically leverage it. Perhaps there are truly checkbox features out there which we will never implement, but I’m (perhaps due to what my dad would call selective listening on my part, perhaps not) having trouble coming up with any presently. Features that exist in other systems that we don’t want?  Certainly. We don’t characterize those as simply “checkbox” though. Perhaps that’s in part because we provide alternatives- but that’s not the case here. We have no comparable way to have this capability as part of the core system.

We, as a community, are clearly losing value by lack of this capability, if by no other measure than simply the numerous users of the commercial implementations feeling that they simply can’t use PG without this feature, for whatever their reasoning.

Thanks,

Stephen