postgres

One of the points I made in my recent NDC talk on 12 Factor microservices, was that you shouldn’t be storing sensitive data, such as API keys, usernames, passwords etc. in the environment variables. Don’t Store Sensitive Data in the Environment My reasoning is that when you were accessing Environment Variables in Heroku’s platform, you were actually accessing some (probably) secure key-value store, rather than actual environment variables. While you can use something like Consul’s key-value store for this, it’s not much better as it still stores all the values in plaintext, and has no auditing or logging....

I have been thinking recently about how the database can influence our design decisions, and perhaps makes them harder than they need to be in some cases. An example of this is the design of a system which stores data about people, specifically for this, their email addresses. A cut down version of the structure is this: table people id serial primary key firstname varchar(50) lastname varchar(50) table emails id serial primary key person_id int => people....