[GemStone-Smalltalk] Production only code

[Jaroslaw Podgajny]

Hi Dirk,

On 13/07/2021 11:43, Dirk Nel via GemStone-Smalltalk wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I'm currently working on some data anonymization stuff in our GemStone
> production database.  I'm thinking of strategies of having certain
> portions of code just running in the prod Db.  As we restore our prod
> Db into our test Db this is difficult.  One idea that I had was to let
> the code that should only run in prod live in topaz scripts on the
> host instead of in the Db.  Any other thoughts about this out there? 
> And maybe just about data anonymization and Gs in general?

One solutions would be so called Tokenization. You would create mapping
to consistently transform confidential data from one string/token to
another, e.g. 'Mitsubishi' translated into 'Zork Company'. This process
would run as part of your test DB bootstap code. One advantage of this
solution is preservation of human readability of data. A disadvantage is
costly nature of the transformation if the data set is not normalized,
i.e. strings are refrerenced directly rathern than via a unique
container Counterparty object, as an example). Additionally naive
equality tests in the code would fail in test, which is probably a good
thing ;).

Another option that does not suffer from costly performance
characteristics of Tokenization is so called Application Level
Encryption. In this solution you encrypt your confidencial data and only
provide access to the key in the production environment. In your test DB
environment users would only see the crypto strings. One of the
disadvantages is that the data is no longer human readable. There is
also a whole domain of complexity around key management to deal with.


Regards,

Jaroslaw.

>
> Regards
> Dirk
>
>
>
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