Comment by phoronixrly

I have some experience with the 'Masking Views' functionality. If you are going to rely on it and specifically in a Rails app, know that it is against conventions and thus is generally inconvenient. This may be the same with any other framework that features DB schema migrations.

More specifically the integration of this functionality at a fortunately ex-employer was purposefully kept away from the dev team (no motivation was offered, however I suspect that some sort of segmentation was sought after) and thus did not take into account that tables with PII did in fact still need their schema changed from time to time.

This lead to the anonymizer extension, together with the confidential views to only be installed on production DB instances with dev, test, and staging instances running vanilla postgres. With this, the possibility to catch DB migration issues related to the confidential views was pushed out to the release itself. This lead to numerous failed releases which involved having the ops team intervene, manually remove the views for the duration of the release, then manually re-create them.

So,

If you plan to use this extension, and specifically its views, make sure you have it set up in the exactly same way on all environments. Also make sure that its initialisation and view creation are part of your framework's DB migrations so that they are documented and easy to precisely reproduce on new environments.