We’ve introduced SASL/SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication support for Materialize. SASL is a framework for modern authentication protocols; SCRAM-SHA-256 is a modern authentication mechanism that never sends your password over the network. Instead, both client and server use cryptographic proofs to verify identity. This means your database connections are now protected by enterprise-grade authentication that never exposes passwords on the wire.
Using SCRAM is particularly useful when setting up a connection pooler such as PgBouncer. Connection poolers like PgBouncer improve performance by reusing a small pool of active database connections across many clients, eliminating the expensive overhead of repeatedly creating and tearing down new connections for each request. With SCRAM, PgBouncer can authenticate users using SCRAM verifiers (hashed credentials) retrieved from the database rather than requiring plaintext passwords in its configuration file.
To get started, follow our authentication guide to enable SASL/SCRAM, and our connection pooling guide.