To kick some things off for PG18, here is an updated version of the
patch for automatic client-side column-level encryption. (See commit
message included in the patch for a detailed description, if you have
forgotten. Also, see [0] if the thread has dropped off your local mail
storage.)
[0]:
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/89157929-c2b6-817b-6025-8e4b2d89d88f(at)enterprisedb(dot)com
This patch got stuck around CF 2023-03 because expanding the size of the
tuple descriptor (with new pg_attribute columns) had a noticeable
performance impact. Various work in PG17 has made it more manageable to
have columns in pg_attribute that are not in the tuple descriptor, and
this patch now takes advantage of that (and I wanted to do this merge
soon to verify that the changes in PG17 are usable). Otherwise, this
version v20 is functionally unchanged over the last posted version v19.
Obviously, it's early days, so there will be plenty of time to have
discussions on various other aspects of this patch. I'm keeping a keen
eye on the discussion of protocol extensions, for example.