Playing with Elephants ~PostgreSQL and Pgpool-II~

    Pgpool-II is a proxy software for PostgreSQL cluster and it supports several authentication methods. How does Pgpool-II perform user authentication? In this post, I will introduce the authentication methods which Pgpool-II supports and how Pgpool-II authentication mechanism works. Authentication methods in Pgpool-II Pgpool-II supports several authentication methods: Trust Authentication MD5 Password Authentication   scram-sha-256 Authentication (Pgpool-II 4.0 or later) Certificate Authentication   PAM Authentication LDAP Authentication (from the next major release 4.2)  Starting with Pgpool-II 4.0, Pgpool-II supports scram-sha-256 authentication. scram-sha-256 authentication method is strongly recommended because it is the most secure password-based authentication method. How does Pgpool-II authentication mechanism work? Since Pgpool-II is a PostgreSQL proxy that works between clients and PostgreSQL servers, the authentication comprises two steps: Authen...

Pgpool-II is a cluster management tool for PostgreSQL that can cache connections to PostgreSQL servers. This blog introduces Pgpool-II connection pooling feature and shows how to configure connection pooling in Pgpool-II. What is connection pooling? Establishing and maintaining Database connections are expensive. The reason is that you have to establish a network connection, perform authentication and so on. Database connection pooling is a cache of database connections to keep database connections open so that the connection can be reused when a connection is required by a future request. Reusing an active connection rather than establishing a new connection each time a connection is requested can improve performance and save system resources. How does connection pooling work in Pgpool-II? Pgpool-II caches established connections to the PostgreSQL servers and reuses them whenever a new request with the same properties (i.e. user name, database, protocol version, and other con...