Mastering PostgreSQL 12 - Third Edition

Handling column-level security

In some cases, not everybody is allowed to see all the data. Just imagine a bank. Some people might see the entire information about a bank account, while others might be limited to only a subset of the data. In a real-world situation, somebody might not be allowed to read the balance column while somebody else might not see the interest rates of people's loans.

Another example would be that people are allowed to see people's profiles, but not their pictures or some other private information. The question now is this: how can column-level security be used?

To demonstrate this, we will add a column to the existing table belonging to the joe role:

test=> ALTER TABLE t_useful ADD COLUMN name text;  
ALTER TABLE ...