Murat Tuncer
Senior Software Engineering Manager @ Microsoft
Murat Tuncer is a Senior Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft working on operating and evolving large‑scale managed PostgreSQL services, including Citus Cloud and Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. His day‑to‑day work focuses on running PostgreSQL reliably in production, handling real‑world operational challenges, and making design trade‑offs at scale. Alongside service operations, Murat has experience developing PostgreSQL extensions and working close to PostgreSQL internals, which gives him a practical perspective on how PostgreSQL features are designed and why they behave the way they do. He enjoys seeing PostgreSQL systems run smoothly in production—and is happiest when they do so quietly, without anyone needing to think about them.
POSETTE 2026 Talk
From trust to Tokens: A Short History of PostgreSQL Authentication
PostgreSQL offers a surprisingly large number of authentication methods—but most users only encounter one or two of them, often without understanding why they exist. In this short talk, we take a fast, story driven tour through the evolution of PostgreSQL authentication. Starting with early Unix centric assumptions (trust, ident, peer), we move through password authentication, enterprise integrations like LDAP and Kerberos, and end with modern identity driven approaches such as certificate and token based authentication. Rather than listing every option, this talk focuses on key inflection points: what problem PostgreSQL was solving at each stage, what trade offs were made, and how those decisions still affect real world deployments today. Attendees will leave with a clear mental model of PostgreSQL authentication—enough to choose wisely, avoid common mistakes, and understand where the ecosystem is heading.
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