Evol Monkey

All databases need some maintenance that we usually perform using scheduled tasks. For example, if you have an RDS instance and you want to get a bloat report once a month, you’ll probably need a small EC2 instance just to do these kinds of things. In this post, we will talk about accessing RDS, getting a result from a SQL statement and reporting it to a slack channel using a scheduled Lambda function; let’s call this poor man’s crontab :) Before we start, psycopg2 isn’t supported by lambda so it needs to be packaged into the lambda deployment package along with any other dependencies, but since psycopg2 requires libpq it needs to be compiled with libpq statically linked. There are many binaries of psycopg2 that you can download, but I would suggest you compile your own, using the latest PostgreSQL source code. We’ll talk about all these steps throughout this post. We’ll cover the following: Creating a new AWS postgres RDS instance How to compile psycopg (we’ll use docker for ...

Yesterday, 20th of June Postgres community released minor version updates for all supported versions.  (11.4, 10.9, 9.6.14, 9.5.18, 9.4.23, 12Beta2) As with any minor version, it is recommended to upgrade and keep your database to the latest minor version. But this release is a bit more important  than others because it includes a fix about a recently  discovered CVE (CVE-2019-10164)  From the release notes: "This release is made outside of the normal update release schedule as the security vulnerability was determined to be critical enough to distribute the fix as quickly as possible. Users who are running PostgreSQL 10, PostgreSQL 11, or the PostgreSQL 12 beta should upgrade as soon as possible." In this post i'll talk about this CVE. What this all about, who is affected and how  to protect your systems against it. What is this all about. A system authenticated user could change their own password with a "special crafted password" that could cra...