On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 11:14:42AM +1100, pakt sardines wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> We're currently developing some large-scale software with the
> intention of selling it (online and off-the-shelf). The version in
> development uses Postgres to store stuff in a number of large
> databases. Ignoring potential licensing issues for now,
There aren't any. PostgreSQL is under the 3-clause BSD license.
> the big issue for us is that the data in the databases has
> significant intellectual property value. It has taken literally
> years of work to collect the data. We do not want the users of the
> commercial product to be able to fire up postgres and type something
> like: user]% pg_dump their_data > our_product
If you don't want your customers to see it, don't ship it to your
customers. That's true whether you use PostgreSQL or not.
> Additionally, we don't want to have to encrypt every entry in the
> database, because that will cause significant overhead during
> processing. My question is, what options do we have? Can postgres
> store data as some sort of unreadable binary, much like you would
> find in a C binary data file? If not postgres, what other database
> could possibly do this, if any?
None, no matter what they purport, and you won't be able to build one
either. You should also consider carefully what it is you're telling
your customers by starting off with an adversary relationship. If
your data is that secret and that valuable, you should not ship it in
the first place.
Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter <david@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666
Skype: davidfetter
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